While Sony Interactive Entertainment president Hideaki Nishino had already spoken about the growth seen by the PlayStation Plus subscription service, vice president of global services at PlayStation – Nick Maguire – has now confirmed that the growth for PS Plus on PS5 has been faster than it was on PS4.
In an interview with Game File, Maguire spoke about high engagement rates for PlayStation Plus, revealing that the more expensive tears of the service – Premium and Extra – have been seeing more and more players sign up. “Engagement in Plus has never been higher than it is right now,” said Maguire.
While PlayStation Plus as a service had originally existed even in the PS3 days, it only started becoming necessary for online multiplayer with the release of the PS4. At the time, the subscription service also rewarded players with free games that they could add to their libraries. The current form of the service with its different tiers was introduced back in 2022, and Maguire has noted that this rework “surpassed our expectations”.
“It’s really given us a new way to reach the audiences with these games, and it’s given new value to partners to find new people to play their titles,” he said. “And just the engagement we see from it is really positive, in terms of the number of people choosing that Catalog and coming back month after month.”
Maguire also noted that, while Sony is continuing to reinvest into the service to attract new subscribers by adding in additional features – like game streaming on PlayStation Portal – he also notes that the company still isn’t keen on releasing its first-party titles on to the service on release. Rather, Sony wants to stick to its current strategy of bringing in three or four third-party (often indie) titles to PS Plus, and bolstering the catalogue with an older PS5 title.
“Our strategy of finding four or five independent day-and-date titles—and using that to complement our strategy of bringing games in when they’re 12, 18 months old or older—that balance for us is working really well across the platform,” Maguire said.
When it comes to the availability of classic PlayStation games from previous console generations through PS Plus, Maguire also spoke about the difficulty in bringing in PS3 games, since the unique hardware of the console means that its games can’t natively run on PS5 hardware. Rather, PS3 titles are often available through cloud streaming.
“Through streaming, we’ll still continue to look at those ones,” noted Maguire about PS3 games. “We haven’t ruled them out. The opportunities are there. But there are a lot of PS3 games already streaming.”
Ultimately, Maguire notes that, despite some negativity in the comments for PlayStation Plus game announcements, the company plans to continue investing in the service.
“I think we’ll continue to listen and learn about what gamers want and try to bring more value in for them,” he said. “We’re very proud of what we’ve delivered in the last few year. And excited to sort of see the response and the engagement we get from players coming in.”
