At GI Live in London, a gaming conference held by Gamesindustry.biz, Shuhei Yoshida, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s SIE Worldwide Studios and head of PlayStation’s indie game program, talked about Sony’s approach to improving the PS Plus service, especially with regard to its top-of-the-line Version Extra.
Unlike Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service, most first-party Xbox games will be available on XGP at launch, but Yoshida said Sony still believes that “games should be released at full price when they are released.”
Older versions of PS Plus had some games that included subscription services at launch, such as Rocket League and Jelly Bean, which Yoshida said really helped their success because it made these multiplayer online games fast. Get a lot of players. But the new multi-tier PS Plus service will take a different route.
For developers and publishers, the added value of the service lies elsewhere, providing games with an additional revenue stream later in their life cycle, just like movies, he explained.
“The new PSPlus has tiers, essentially it’s like the old PS Plus, we still release two or three new games a month, and the new tier Extra has a catalog of hundreds of games for people to play.”
“The idea with Extra was that we wanted to help publishers with lifecycle management. I manage first-party titles at PlayStation, so I know it’s like in a movie: first in theaters, then it becomes a pay-per-view Pay, or join a subscription service, or air on TV for free, each time generating new revenue and reaching a wider audience.”
“In the same way, we believe that at launch, at full price, maybe six months, three months, or three years later, when sales of games drop off, the inclusion of PSPlus Extra as a service can help bring those games to life. Introduce to a new, wider audience. Some people may have missed these games when they came out, it’s a great opportunity to generate word of mouth, or if there’s a DLC or a sequel, we can help increase interest in these games , and make the series known to a wider audience.”
“Therefore, we encourage publishers to use these services to manage the lifecycle of each title.” At the end of the talk, he said that the game subscription service “is still experimental for Sony at the moment.”
