Through the words of vice president Nick Maguire, Sony has reiterated again that i PS5 games of first parties they won’t make it to day one on PlayStation Plus Extras and Premiums, but only months or even years after they hit stores. A philosophy at the antipodes of the Game Pass, where the inclusion of all Xbox Studios games since launch probably represents the greatest strength of the service, which has reached 25 million subscribers in a few years. So is Sony pursuing the wrong strategy?
The answer depends on your point of view. From that of the players, for obvious reasons, yes: having exclusives such as God of War: Ragnarok, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Gran Turismo 7 and Horizon: Forbidden West included since launch within an annual cost subscription (Extra) just a few tens of euros higher than a full-price game would obviously be a great advantage for all members.
From Sony’s point of view, however, it is clear that it would not be convenient at all, at least for the moment, and the latest official data pitted by the company in this sense speak for themselves. Although PlayStation Plus has 47.4 million subscribers (slightly down from 2021), just one year after the launch of Extra and Premium, almost a third of total subscribers have already converted to one of the higher tiers. In short, the number of Plus subscribers has not increased, but revenues have, given that a good portion of users now pay a higher subscription.
Not only that, Maguire in an interview with Multiplayer.it added that PlayStation Plus “has recorded more than a billion hours of gameplay since the launch of the new catalog (PS Extra and Premium) and the average monthly engagement is seven times higher than to what we saw the previous year with PS Now”, decidedly positive numbers.
And in all this, unlike Microsoft, Sony does not give up a large chunk of the tens of millions of copies sold of its flagship titles. Just to mention the most recent exclusives, God of War Ragnarok has sold 11 million copies in less than three months, while Horizon Forbidden West has exceeded 8 million.
Indeed, again according to Maguire’s words (in this case from an interview with GamesIndustry), the company exploits the delayed entry of its flagship exclusives into PlayStation Plus as a possibility to “reach additional users twelve, eighteen or twenty-four months later their publication”, which in some ways is a similar strategy to that adopted with the PC ports.
In short, Sony is currently happy with its business model because it is generating excellent numbers, which means that as a result first gamers are satisfied with the PS Plus offer. Or rather, the absence of PS5 exclusives in the launch catalog at this historic moment does not represent a lack so crucial as to push subscribers to switch to the service of the competition.
After all, we are talking about normal market dynamics: PlayStation has a dominant position and therefore can do the good and bad weather and “take it easy” by taking advantage of a much stronger brand than that of Xbox. Microsoft for its part is not a charitable organization: if the Game Pass is filled every month with first and third party games on day one at an even too convenient monthly cost, it is because it has the dual objective of reducing the gap with the rival and expanding a relatively young business model that could define the future of gaming.
Could things change in the future? Of course yes. It is clear that if the competitor’s service continues to grow and expand, even Sony will have to adapt and change, like any company in any type of market. For example, it has already done so by introducing the Extra and Premium tiers themselves, which are in fact a response to the Game Pass, as well as by diverting a large part of its investments into live services, riskier but potentially more profitable than single player games.
Let’s talk about it is a daily opinion column that offers a starting point for discussion around the news of the day, a small editorial written by a member of the editorial staff but which is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.
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