TLOU port was kinda bad .
Yes, the TLOU port has issues. But after these are addressed you have a very solid title. Success/failure is not decided in a few days, weeks or months, but in quarters and years, because that's how companies are measured. Not by the average attention span of gamers, which is like 2 seconds.
But that's not the only thing that is happening right now: Now that we are seeing more and more games that are no longer releasing on PS4/XBX, developers are no longer bogged down by their limitations. With PS5/XBSX games usually consuming around 10-12GB of RAM (out of the shared 16) for graphical assets, we see that all of a sudden PC-gamers are finding their fancy 8GB VRAM cards are reduced to low-end. These folks are used to be able to run PS-to-PC ported games at max settings at whatever resolution at high frame rates, but they can't anymore now that modern releases all of a sudden consume 10-12 GB of VRAM just to have the same graphical assets as the PS5 (which translates to Medium settings now, oops
). Oh, you want those fancy PC Master Race textures on Ultra and play at 1440p/4k/60FPS/120FPS? Not unless you have a 16GB card you don't.
Many PC folks don't want to accept this new reality yet.
Check system requirements for TLOU and other recent releases or many upcoming titles that do not release on old-gen consoles:
Minimum = 720p/30FPS Low (nobody uses this right, except Steam Deck?)
Recommended = 1080/60FPS High -> 8GB required
High/Performance = 1440p/60FPS High -> 10/12 GB required
Ultra = 4k/60/120 FPS Ultra -> 16GB or more
Of course you can still tweak settings and reduce VRAM consumption in other areas than textures so you can dial them up a notch and not have reduce resolution, but that requires effort and doesn't come out of the box.
I think this is also something that Kaz had in mind when considering to release for PC or not. GT titles typically squeeze every drop of performance out of the PS hardware. He knows that most GPUs out there (because they were friggin' expensive the past few years and still are) can't run a PS5-native title at the quality he wants. And again: a hard to swallow pill for PC gamers. Blame nVidia for skimping on VRAM.
But instead they say that developers are not optimizing memory properly.
They already developed the game. It’s just a port
While true, it's not just copy/paste. Often there's revised/upgraded content as well as unique-to-pc technical stuff.
And before folks call me a PS fanboy: I'm a PC gamer. And yeah, I have an 8GB card.