God of War: Ragnarok is set to come to come to PS5 some time next year. Could it come to PS4 as well? The head of PlayStation isn’t saying.
In an interview with the Telegraph published today, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO, Jim Ryan, was asked point blank whether God of War Ragnarok will be a PS5 exclusive. Ryan wouldn’t commit. “Sorry. I’ve got nothing to say about that today,” he told the British paper.
It might seem like a no brainer that the next God of War, which was first announced last September during a PS5 showcase livestream, would be next-gen only, but Ryan’s refusal to clarify comes at a time when Sony doesn’t seem to have a clear policy on which of its major first-party games will be PS5 exclusives and which will also be headed to PS4.
It seemed like Spider-Man: Miles Morales would only be on next-gen hardware when it was first revealed over the summer, but Sony later announced it would be on PS4 as well, and that Horizon Forbidden West and Sackboy: A Big Adventure would be cross-gen games too. While Miles Morales and Sackboy both launched with the PS5 last week, Forbidden West is a 2021 game like God of War: Ragnarok, and not due out until sometime in the second half at that. Meanwhile, Insomniac Games confirmed earlier this month that Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, due out in the first half of next year, would be a PS5 exclusive.
One of the biggest selling points for any new console are its exclusives, and right now the PS5’s only Sony-published ones are Demon’s Souls Remake and Astro’s Playroom. God of War: Ragnarok could be the tipping point in whether current PS4 owners continue to still have access to most of Sony’s new games for at least another year.
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“As we move towards the next-generation in 2020, one of our tasks — probably our main task — is to take that community and transition it from PlayStation 4 to PlayStation 5, and at a scale and pace that we’ve never delivered on before,” Ryan told GamesIndustry.biz a year ago.
Last week, VGC reported that head of platform planning at Playstation, Hideaki Nishino, told Japanese outlet AV Watch that the transition could take up to three years. “In terms of compatibility, it is important to move PS4 titles on PS5, but I have insisted that forward compatibility (supplying the same titles as PS5 to PS4) is important,” Nishino said in the interview according to VGC.
Only time will tell which actually ends up being the case. Sony did not immediately respond to a request for comment.