Sony has just announced an acquisition of Nixxes Software, a game developer mostly known for making excellent PC ports of other studios’ games, and it could be a sign that more PS5 games will eventually make their way over as PC games.
Herman Hulst, the head of PlayStation Studios, announced the news through Twitter. While we don’t know what kind of games PlayStation will have Nixxes working on, it’s not the first time Sony and Nixxes have crossed paths, notably helping get Killzone: Shadowfall out the door in time for the PS4 launch.
Excited to announce that the talented Dutch studio Nixxes Software will be joining PlayStation Studios. It’s a real pleasure to welcome a team with such deep technical expertise and vast experience to the @Playstation family. Huge congrats to everyone @NixxesSoftware!July 1, 2021
But more than a Killzone launch title, Nixxes is way better known on PC, where it’s helped some pretty high-profile games launch. Most notably is the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy. No matter how you feel about those games, the PC versions are still used to test hardware to this day, thanks to the extremely solid ports – especially Rise of the Tomb Raider.
We have heard in recent times that Sony is going to try to have more of its games move over to PC. And we even heard Herman Hulst talk back in May about how Sony is still early in its plans for the platform, and, more importantly that “Releasing games on PC will not come ever at the expense of building an exciting lineup of great console games”.
Bringing Nixxes in house will let Sony have its main studios never really have to worry about porting their games over to PC, as it has an extremely experienced developer that specializes in doing just that.
This is all speculation, of course, and it’s early days, but Sony bought Nixxes Studios for a reason, and fleshing out its PC offerings would be a pretty great reason.
Sony needs some help with its PC ports
So we’ve recently heard of a few PS4 games getting ported over to PC, with Days Gone and Horizon Zero Dawn being the heavyweights. Both of these games were ported through in-house studios and while Days Gone has generally been, well, fine, Horizon Zero Dawn was an absolute mess when it first came out.
When we were benchmarking it for our own performance analysis piece, we kept running into crashes, inconsistent performance and needed to reinstall shaders every time you changed resolution. The game is a lot better now, but it was in a rough spot when it first launched.
If Sony is able to offload the development of PC games to a dedicated developer, its core studios can instead focus on delivering the next big PS5 exclusive, and we’ll get a better PC port – it’s a win-win.
Plus, with re-releases of its older games, Sony typically goes with outside companies anyway. Sony accidentally leaked its purchase of Bluepoint a couple days ago, but when it was an independent company, the gaming giant used the developer to create stunning ports of Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus.
We don’t know what Sony’s plans are regarding Nixxes, and it could just use the studio to support other studios on new PS5 games. But if Sony is serious about putting out stellar PC versions of its best games – looking at you Bloodborne and The Last of Us – it’d be silly not to put Nixxes on those projects.
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