Sony’s new PlayStation Plus tiers launch next month with the current service being renamed to PlayStation Plus Essential. The Extra and Premium tiers will provide access to hundreds of PS4 and PS5 games with the latter also offering access to PS One, PS2 and PSP titles via cloud streaming. But unlike Xbox Game Pass, first-party titles won’t launch day one on the service.
Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan commented on this several months ago. Recently, however, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki addressed the same in the company’s fiscal year 2021 investor Q&A (transcription via Genki on Twitter). “I will refrain from making comments on the competitors’ strategy. 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.”
It makes sense, especially when you consider Sony’s market cap versus Microsoft (which is $2.016 Trillion as of May 2022). The former relies on its big exclusives to drive software sales along with interest in the PlayStation 5 as a whole. On the other hand, Microsoft is building up the Xbox brand in PC gaming, cloud gaming and much more in addition to consoles.
The all-new PlayStation Plus is targeting a release on May 23rd for Asia, June 1st for Japan, June 13th for the Americas and June 22nd for Europe. Sony has yet to outline a number of things like the full list of PS4 and PS5 titles that will be available in the Extra and Premium tiers (though Ryan has claimed that every “major publisher” will be included). Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.