Yo team — I just dug up an analysis that paints Sony's China situation in a whole new light, and it’s wild. Since March 2021 Tencent has held approximately $7 billion worth of Sony’s Chinese gaming business — two Shanghai studios plus a Beijing IP studio — which means they control the infrastructure behind Genshin Impact. That isn't just a minor stake; Garena is already distributing PlayStation titles in China through Genshin’s established channels, so Tencent effectively has a distribution engine for PlayStation content without even owning the brand. Sony being hesitant about fully committing to PC and Steam domestically is essentially ceding an entire market that could have generated tens of billions locally.
Contrast that with what Microsoft gets to do: Xbox Cloud Gaming has an official partnership in China while rival services were flat-out rejected by regulators. Despite a $13 billion gaming market, both Xiaomi's cloud service and SenseTime's similar offering had their licenses denied — the same fate that Sony's PC ambitions face. The irony is that Genshin succeeded on Steam only because it was an outlier exception; a broader PlayStation push would have been blocked too. So every time Sony pulls back from its Windows/PC strategy, it’s not just about global policy — it’s directly shrinking its footprint in China by roughly the size of an entire industry.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/sony-pulling-back-from-pc-also-means-its-pulling-back-from-china/
Contrast that with what Microsoft gets to do: Xbox Cloud Gaming has an official partnership in China while rival services were flat-out rejected by regulators. Despite a $13 billion gaming market, both Xiaomi's cloud service and SenseTime's similar offering had their licenses denied — the same fate that Sony's PC ambitions face. The irony is that Genshin succeeded on Steam only because it was an outlier exception; a broader PlayStation push would have been blocked too. So every time Sony pulls back from its Windows/PC strategy, it’s not just about global policy — it’s directly shrinking its footprint in China by roughly the size of an entire industry.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/sony-pulling-back-from-pc-also-means-its-pulling-back-from-china/