PlayStation Plus Loses 2,000,000 Subs Months Following Relaunch

Sony’s June PlayStation Plus relaunch doesn’t look like it’s going entirely as planned. In the Japanese giant’s latest financial report, it’s shown that since Plus launched, it’s lost 1.9 million subscribers between July and September this year. Sony’s CFO Hiroki Totoki said there “hasn’t been great momentum.” Despite this, the company has simultaneously seen a 10% increase in revenue.

As Observed by VGCAccording to the report, PlayStation Plus subscriptions fell after the widely-hyped relaunch. The figures dropped from 47.3million to 45.4million. While these are still healthy numbers, which is almost twice what Microsoft can boast about for Game Pass, they are not what Sony would expect given the greatly improved nature of the subscription service.

PlayStation Plus’s relaunch This was not an easy deal to digest.. Adding three overlapping tiers, with some confusion among potential subscribers over which tier provided access to which era of games, it’s understandable that all the promotional noise made in June would have served to simply remind a lot of people about the money coming out of their account each month. Given they would then have had to fathom which version of the new service they wanted, it makes sense that those who’d not used it in a long while would have instead just cancelled.

What’s more surprising is that the rebooted offers, with hundreds of classic PlayStation games available for a sub, haven’t attracted a significant new audience. Sony’s determination not to include new first-party titles, but rather charge a defiant $70 for them, could well be putting off many who see Game Pass going in entirely the opposite direction.

These figures follow a trend that’s been seen since the fall of 2021, when subscriber numbers started to head in the wrong direction. Plus had 48million customers last summer. This number dropped to 47.4million by the winter. It seems that trend has continued despite the relaunch, with the total now down 2.6 million since last year’s peak.

Sony has been able to bring in more revenue than expected, possibly due to the higher tiers. Increasing. It’s up 10%, to ¥116 billion ($788 million), which as VGC points out, means they’re currently making more money per subscriber, even if the count is falling. Although, should this trend continue, that won’t work for much longer.

These figures were discussed by CFO HirokiTotoki (via) during an earnings call. VGC’s translation() stated that he believed that this was due in part to the combination of people going outside again following the worst of the pandemic as well as declining sales of third-party games, such as PlayStation 4, and declining numbers of PlayStation 4 sales. He added, “In the second quarter we renewed our services and there hasn’t been great momentum as a whole,” before laying some of the blame on a lack of “aggressive” ad spending.

Totoki went on to tell investors that “very good titles” should help turn things around, alongside better promotions. “We think we are able to recover,” he concluded.

The Last reported Game Pass figures There were 25,000,000 subscribers in January 2013, up from 18million a year earlier. So while Microsoft is still far behind Sony, it’s very much trending in the opposite direction.