PlayStation Plus has lost 1.9 million subscribers since relaunch, Sony says

Sony’s latest financial results revealed that PlayStation Plus had lost close to 2 million subscribers between September 2022 and July 2022 following the relaunch of June.

After adding tiers to its service, the number of subscribers fell to 47.3 million to 45.4 millions. The simplest level of the service offers online gaming and additional features such as cloud saves. It also gives you a few free games per month. Access to an extensive catalog of PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5 games, plus classic games and streaming games at the Premium level are available through these new tiers.

It’s not all bad news for Sony. Despite the number of PlayStation Plus users declining — and overall monthly active users also going down, from 103 to 102 million — network services revenue, which includes PS Plus subscription revenue, increased by 10%. Users signing up at higher tiers is likely to explain this.

In comments during an earnings call, transcribed by VGC, Sony chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki admitted that “there hasn’t been a great momentum as a whole” for the renewed service. He allowed that Sony hadn’t aggressively promoted it and predicted a recovery following “better promotions” in the future.

In general, Sony’s results and Totoki’s comments paint a picture of a company weathering a tough period, with “more people going outdoors” as the coronavirus pandemic eases, a dry games release schedule, and constrained supply of new PlayStation 5 consoles due to chip shortages. Halfway through the financial year, only 5.7million of the 18,000,000 consoles the company had planned to sell have been sold.

According to most, however, the PS5 stock situation has been improving rapidly. Sony stated that they had produced 6.5 million consoles over the quarter. However, it still believes it could reach their 18 million target. The recent publication of Modern Warfare 2 – Call of DutyRed-hot Exclusive God of war Ragnarok just around the corner, Sony finally has some big games to sell — and a steady supply of consoles to sell with them. PlayStation is likely to be reporting much better numbers in three months’ time.

These market conditions could be the reason for declining PlayStation Plus usage or are there deeper issues. Critics have criticized the new service for having confusing and fragmented subscription tiers as well as a weak selection of classic games. It’s often compared with Microsoft’s Game Pass, which most agree is better marketed: Game Pass’s software catalog is consistent across all tiers, with the top Ultimate tier combining console, PC, cloud, and online pay, while the game selection is better curated and, unlike PlayStation Plus, offers new releases on day one, including some major exclusives — something Sony has ruled out for PS Plus.

Game Pass subscriptions sat at 25 million in January 2022, which is considerably lower than PlayStation Plus, but the comparison is not like-for-like — Xbox Live Gold, Microsoft’s basic online-play option, is not included, and the number of Gold subscribers is not reported by Microsoft. Microsoft’s reporting is more opaque than Sony’s, so it is tough to say whether Game Pass is really performing any better.

It will be interesting to see if subscriber numbers rise in response to the anticipated increase in PS5 sales, and other active users. We’ll find out in three months’ time.