Platinum Games and Sega's wonderfully over-the-top action brawler Bayonetta has finally landed on PC—over seven years since it debuted on European and North American PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles. Exclusive to Steam, players can now assume control of the game's eponymous shapeshifting, heel-firing witch in 60fps, unlocked resolutions in up to 4K ultra HD, and with optimised mouse and keyboard support.
What's more, those who purchase Bayonetta before Tuesday, April 25 will gain access to its Digital Deluxe Edition free-of-charge, which comes packing a five track soundtrack sampler and a digital artbook with concept art, wallpapers and avatars.
Here's a launch trailer:
"The PC market is huge and can definitely not be ignored. We are absolutely aware of that, and we’ve always felt this way," a spokesperson for Platinum told PC Gamer. "We’ve always had a positive stance towards porting our titles to PC, but the decisions as to which platforms we release our games on, and which platforms are the main focus for the games we make are largely made by the publishers, so this is not something we can decide on our own.
"However, most third party publishers nowadays realize the PC should not be ignored, so I believe we should be able to become more actively involved in the PC market from here on out."
Over the past few years, Sega has brought one-time console exclusives such as The Typing of the Dead and the hugely popular Valkyria Chronicles to desktops, and Platinum brought Bayonetta itself to the Wii U in 2014.
"We developed Bayonetta 1 all by ourselves, and we optimized it for Xbox 360, which resulted in some issues when porting the game to other platforms," the spokesperson adds. "We had to dive back in and change a lot about the internal structure when we ported it to Wii U, but I believe this experience helped us make the jump to PC go a lot smoother. Our current proprietary engine is built with PC-based cross-platform development in mind, so I think it should be easier now to avoid similar problems in the future."
Platinum continues, suggesting if it were the developer's decision alone it'd see all of its games ported to PC—"if it were up to us, we’d port all of our games to PC, but it all depends on the publishers"—such as Vanquish and Anarchy Reigns. If Bayonetta on PC is a success though, might that encourage Platinum to make another?
"We still feel strongly about putting more consideration into the PC market. If our current efforts prove successful, this will only make PC development more attractive."
Bayonetta is available on PC now via Steam for £14.99/$19.99. Before you go, check out the following developer diary below, and Peter "Durante" Thoman's PC port analysis in this direction.
