Sony has revealed disappointing dips for PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Network users for this financial quarterly report.
PlayStation Plus has lost 2 million users since the company pushed their revamp last June. The service had 45.4 million subscribers by the end of this quarter, which is down from the previous quarter’s number of 47.3 million.
Furthermore, PlayStation Network’s MAUs, or monthly active users, were at 102 million users for this quarter. PlayStation Network had 104 million MAUs a year ago and 103 million MAUs just last month. This is the lowest number of subscribers that the service has had since Sony did a refresh last June.
We laid out an explainer for the PlayStation network services refresh at that time. PlayStation Plus Essential is the exact same deal as what Sony used to offer as PlayStation Plus. This is now the lowest tier. PlayStation Plus Extra bundles a library of games from the PlayStation 4, which will be playable on both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, is PlayStation Plus Premium. This is the tier that gives subscribers access to game trials. They get two hours to play a game before deciding to buy, and if they go through with it, their progress can be carried over to the final purchase.
This is also the tier that offers Sony’s classic library, and this is likely where much of the controversy comes from. Sony bundles in their catalog of PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable games, all easily downloadable with cloud saves. However, Sony did not implement emulation for PlayStation 3 games on PlayStation 5, and these are instead only playable via the cloud.
While the new system isn’t exactly confusing or a poor deal compared to what Sony offered, gamers may have simply been less interested in what Sony was offering.
To extend that value, Sony offered a PlayStation Plus app on PC where subscribers can play their library via streaming and cloud saves. However, even this ran into problems as it launched with errors in what games were actually available to stream.
We cannot make a one to one comparison with Microsoft’s figures as they report their quarterly financials in a different way. However, it is interesting to compare the differences between what Sony and Microsoft have been reporting in their financials in general.
In this case, Microsoft reported that their Xbox hardware sales are up and software sales are down, mirroring Sony’s report. Microsoft also confirmed that Game Pass subscriptions are going down compared to recent quarters, but surprisingly, their cloud gaming business and user metrics are up.
Team Xbox would know if they are doing better or worse than PlayStation in terms of raw numbers. We can surmise that their similar performance may reflect general trends in the industry, and both companies may have to redraw plans for the coming financial years as the increasingly complicated effects of the pandemic, invasion of Ukraine, global market conditions, and now the US China tech conflict, serve to complicate their businesses here and now.
Source: VideoGamesChronicle
