Hot on the heels of the announcement of the PlayStation Plus upgrade to a gaming subscription service, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan has given an interview to GameIndustry.Biz going into more detail and explaining some key choices.
The biggest of course is that unlike Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, Sony’s offering will not include exclusive first-party games that launch on the service at the same time as they come out at retail.
Microsoft has made it a selling point of their Game Pass, at the cost of potential full-priced game purchases. Microsoft also puts a larger focus on multiplayer and games as service titles, games that work better via the subscription service format due to other forms of monetisation.
For Sony, whose exclusives are an even bigger selling point of its system and who generally put more focus on self-contained big-budget single-player games, Ryan says going the day-and-date approach would jeopardise their ability to create such titles:
“We feel like we are in a good virtuous cycle with the studios where the investment delivers success, which enables yet more investment, which delivers yet more success. We like that cycle and we think our gamers like that cycle.
[In terms of] putting our own games into this service, or any of our services, upon their release… as you well know, this is not a road that we’ve gone down in the past. And it’s not a road that we’re going to go down with this new service.
We feel if we were to do that with the games that we make at PlayStation Studios, that virtuous cycle will be broken. The level of investment that we need to make in our studios would not be possible, and we think the knock-on effect on the quality of the games that we make would not be something that gamers want.”
Outside of Sony, most AAA publishers are reluctant to put their most recent games onto subscription services and the success of titles like “Elden Ring” and “Resident Evil: Village” to Sony’s own titles like “Horizon: Forbidden West” and “Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales” show there’s still plenty of people purchasing full-priced new games out there without waiting a year or more for them to show up on subscription services.
Ryan however says he’s nothing if not a pragmatist and PlayStation’s current position on this is subject to change if the economics suggest it would be in their best interest – which is what led to Sony publishing titles on PC in recent years:
“The way the world is changing so very quickly at the moment, nothing is forever. Who would have said even four years ago that you would see AAA PlayStation IP being published on PC? We started that last year with Horizon Zero Dawn, then Days Gone, and now God of War — a hugely polished and accomplished PC version of that game.
[We’ve had] great critical success and great commercial success, and everybody has made their peace with that happening and is completely at ease with it. I look back four years and think nobody would have seen that coming. The way our publishing model works right now [putting new games straight into PS Plus] doesn’t make any sense. But things can change very quickly in this industry.
So I don’t want to cast anything in stone at this stage. All I’m talking to today is the approach we’re taking in the short term. The way our publishing model works right now, it doesn’t make any sense. But things can change very quickly in this industry, as we all know.”
As revealed by the list of launch titles, Sony will have both “Spider-Man: Miles Morales” and “Returnal” on the service in June – those games being made available around 15-20 months after their initial launches.
Pricing wise while the top PS Plus Premium tier at $18 carries a higher monthly cost than Xbox Game Pass Ultimate at $15, he says the great majority of people (over 67%) subscribe to PS Plus presently through a twelve-month subscription. Going that way it works out at $10 a month – just $5 a month more than what many of the current 48 million subscribers pay now.
Xbox Game Pass generally has over 400 downloadable titles on offer at any one time (454 for the console at present) from across several generations (XB1, XB360, original Xbox). Sony’s service will have up to a 400 downloadable title PS4/PS5 library at launch along with a 300+ library of streaming and/or downloadable titles from the PS1, PS2, PS3 & PSP eras.
Ryan says outside of its first-party games, expect “every major publisher” to be present on the service and conversations are continuing with a mix of indies, big games and a deliberate line-up that “ticks all sorts of boxes”.
While the subscription business model has grown in importance in recent years, the aim of this is to offer choice:
It’s all about choice. There are obviously many millions of people who are happy to subscribe to PlayStation Plus. We offer them that option on the platform, and we think that we are offering a significantly improved option with the changes we have made. Equally, if people want to play Fornite or Call of Duty or FIFA, and have their sustained engagement that way, that’s fine, too. Nobody is obliged to do anything.”
The new three-tiered PlayStation Plus service is scheduled to launch in June.
