If you felt buoyed by yesterday’s new Sony is making a leap forward with PS5 cloud streaming on PS Plus, today the company reminded us that’s about as close as the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate experience as we’re going to get for now.
While Microsoft offers ‘day one’ first-party games on Game Pass as a matter of course, Sony prefers to do things the traditional way by selling copies of the games for many months before offering them to PS Plus users.
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In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, the man in charge of subscriptions for the PlayStation brand says that current strategy is locked in.
Nick Maguire, a VP with Sony says: “We’re happy with our strategy. Putting games in a bit later in the life cycle has meant that we can reach more customers 12, 18, 24 months after they have released. We’re seeing customers still get excited about those games and jumping in. For us, that’s working.
“Occasionally, there will be an opportunity to invest in a day-and-date like Stray and we will jump on those when they come in. But for us, letting those [first-party] games go out to the platform outside the service first… that’s working and that will continue to be our strategy moving forward.”
Given the strength of Sony’s first-party exclusive line-up it perhaps makes more sense for games to have a year or so in the wild prior to their inclusion within the PlayStation Plus proposition.
Such a shift would also require Sony to fundamentally adjust its business model towards a subscription-first strategy, as Microsoft undoubtedly has with its own first-party properties.
With what appears to be an incredibly strong lead in the current console generation (perhaps unassailable), and a more robust PlayStation Plus offering that’s about to include the streaming of the digital PS5 games players own, the PS Plus freebies, and game trials, it appears Sony is right to stay the course for now.
Speaking more generally about PS Plus moving forward, Maguire added: “We are constantly working out what the right strategy is moving forward. How are player habits going to evolve and how do we make sure the service meets those future habits? No more I can say on that at the moment but obviously we are keeping close to it and thinking about the role that Plus can play moving forward.”
