During the company’s recent financial call, PlayStation Executive Hiroki Totoki commented on the possibility of PlayStation launching their first-party titles into a subscription service like PlayStation Plus, following what Microsoft and Xbox do with Xbox Game Studios titles launching day one into Xbox Game Pass. “I will refrain from making comments on the competitors’ strategy,” Totoki said. “Our current thinking is to have development costs [and] 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 first-party title quality and that is our concern.”
Totoki says that PlayStation wants to make sure that they spend the right amount of development costs to have solid products/titles to be introduced in the right manner.
Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan said “The games that we make are getting bigger; they’re getting better, they’re getting more beautiful, they’re getting richer, the narrative is getting stronger. Putting these games into a subscription service immediately upon their release would break this virtuous circle, and we wouldn’t be able to invest in the way that we’re currently able to. So, we’re not doing it.”
PlayStation also revealed that they are planning to spend 40bn yen (roughly £249m/$308m) on first-party games. “We plan to increase software development expenses aimed at strengthening first-party software at our existing studios by approximately 40bn yen,” Sony said.
Next month, the all-new PlayStation Plus service is set to launch. The new service features three tiers to choose from, Essential, Extra, and Premium. The Essential tier is basically what PlayStation Plus is right now. Extra adds a catalog of up to 400 PS4 and PS5 games to download. Premium adds up to 340 additional games including PS3 games that are available via cloud streaming and a catalog of games from the original PlayStation, PS2, and PSP that will have both streaming and download options to play.