Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s CFO, recently reaffirmed the PlayStation belief that the quality of its first-party games would decline if they were added to PlayStation Plus on day one.
The strategy of having AAA games coming to a service similar to Xbox Game Pass on launch day and having a vast library of titles won’t be present for PlayStation players anytime soon. The new PS Plus subscription service should start next month and will include hundreds of games for the premium subscribers. But unlike Microsoft’s Game Pass service, it won’t have first-party games on the day of their launch.
“I will refrain from making comments on the competitors’ strategy,” Totoki said during an investors call this week. “Our current thinking is to have development costs/appropriate R&D investment for quality products and that will improve the platform and also improve the business in the long run. AAA type titles on PS5, if we distribute that on the subscription services we may need to shrink the investment needed for that and that will deteriorate the 1st party title quality and that is our concern. So we want to make sure we spend the appropriate development costs to have solid products/titles to be introduced in the right manner.”
This line of thought has already been shared by other Sony members, like PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan in the official PlayStation Podcast in April. “The games that we make are getting bigger; they’re getting better, they’re getting more beautiful, they’re getting richer, the narrative is getting stronger,” he said. “Putting these games into a subscription service immediately upon their release would break this virtuous circle, and we wouldn’t be able to invest in the way that we’re currently able to. So, we’re not doing it.”
The new PlayStation Plus service is set to be released on June 13 in the Americas and June 22 in Europe. Players who already have subscriptions to both PS Plus and PS Now will be upgraded to the PS Plus Premium tier for the length of their two subscriptions.
