This past March, Sony thought it would be a keen and swell idea to mess with its PlayStation Plus subscription plan, announcing plans to break it up into three different tiers in June, stuffing access to a number of titles from across Sony’s gaming platform history as well as its PS Now service behind different price walls. The market has since had time to react, and according to a recent supplemental financial report from Sony, the company saw 1.9M subscribers cancel access to the service between July and September.
In addition to the lowered subscription numbers, MAUs for the PlayStation Network also dropped from 104M to 102M during the same three-month period – the company’s lowest MAU figure since reporting the numbers in 2020. With all of that said, revenue from Sony’s Network services, which includes both ad revenue and PS Plus revenue, was up 10%, presumably because the remaining players who are subscribed are spending more as a result of moving to higher tiers of the service.
According to a transcription of the related earnings call, Sony CFO Hiroki Totomi admits the service hasn’t had “a great momentum as a whole” since its relaunch and attributed the falling numbers to “declining third-party game and PlayStation 4 sales and more people going outdoors.”
Hiroki expects next quarter to bring better news on the strength of releases like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and God of War Ragnarok and also confirmed plans to have “more penetration on the PS5,” better promotions for the service overall, and “very good titles.”
