Just a few days ago, the hacker group Rhysida claimed to have hacked Sony's game studio Insinomniac Games, and in a series of documents it has released, in addition to revealing the studio's specific game production budget, as well as upcoming games such as "Wolverine", and even Sony's concerns about the increasing cost of its game development have been made public. In addition, it is worth mentioning that some of the massive documents uploaded by Rhysida point to Sony's plan to expand its PS Plus subscription service to more platforms.
According to relevant documents, Sony internally refers to this plan as "Services 3."0", which aims to "attract more potential users through a unified subscription plan across multiple platforms". Specifically, it is to expand the PS Plus subscription service from the existing PlayStation platform to mainstream devices such as PCs, mobile phones, tablets, browsers, and smart TVs. It also mentions, "Services 30" is to integrate R-star's GTA+, Disney+, Spotify membership, and even miHoYo's game subscription services, so as to expand the cross-platform PS Plus subscription plan.
It is not difficult to see that this "services 30" is basically a benchmark for Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (hereinafter referred to as XGPU). In order to achieve its own purpose, Sony not only found miHoYo, which is now unbeatable on the mobile side, and R star, which is dominantly popular on the PC side, but even prepared the **streaming** subscription service Disney+ and **streaming** platform Spotify for it. Then the question arises, can PS Plus pose a threat to Microsoft's XGPU in the PC and mobile phone markets?
In the eyes of many industry insiders, how PS Plus succeeds on console may fail for the same reasons on mobile and PC. In May last year, the new version of PS Plus was launched due to the operation of backstabbing old users, which quickly ushered in a lot of scolding, but in the end, players still chose to chop their hands, after all, online games and new games in the library every month are still quite attractive. According to the data released by Sony in its last financial report, as of March 2023, PS Plus has more than 47.4 million users. In contrast, XGP has 25 million members.
In fact, PS Plus is a latecomer on the console side because of the advantages of the host itself, rather than PS Plus, which is really attractive. According to the relevant data released by Sony a few days ago, since its release in November 2020, the cumulative sales of PlayStation 5 have exceeded 50 million units. With such a large user base, there are naturally more paying users available for conversion. However, after jumping out of the console platform, the market competitiveness of PS Plus is not enough, after all, Sony's exclusive strategy has no advantage on the PC side and the mobile side.
Admittedly, marked by 2020's Horizon Zero Dawn, a large number of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) first-party games have landed on PC in recent years, but the problem is that this gaming camp is too thin on PC. And PC is also different from consoles, this area of the market is more fully competitive, in addition to Microsoft, there are also Valve's Steam, Epic Games' Epic Games**. What's more, when it comes to the PC side, it is Microsoft's home field, and the integration of Windows and Xbox is also a project that it has been pushing in the past.
And console players who buy PS Plus, in addition to the games that are given away every month, the key is to connect with other players. But the problem is that no game manufacturer or platform has ever tried to play online on PC for an additional fee, and Sony must not have the courage to risk the world's condemnation. Therefore, the biggest selling point of PS Plus on the host side is obviously not valid on the PC side.
If you say "services 30 "It's just a difficult situation on PC, but it may be even more difficult on mobile. At present, the services provided by Microsoft XGPU on mobile are in the form of cloud gaming, but Sony's PS Now cloud gaming is obviously not comparable to Microsoft for the time being. After all, Microsoft Azure is in a leading position in the world in cloud services, and Xcloud, which is supported by Azure data centers, is almost the current hegemon of the cloud gaming track, and even the British regulator's opposition to Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard was also the reason for the former's monopoly in the cloud gaming field.
So in this way, the odds of a win are slim to describe Sony's cross-platform subscription plan "services 3."0" doesn't seem excessive, but in that case, why would Sony do it?The answer is that they want to make money, and more precisely, the PS Plus subscription service itself needs to break even as soon as possible.
Previously, at the end of August this year, Sony announced without warning that the price of PS Plus would increase by at least 30% across the board, and it did not come with corresponding rights upgrades, which once again made players boil.
Behind Sony's operation, perhaps the growth of PS Plus users has fallen into a ceiling, and 48 million users may be the limit of PS Plus. Due to the large-scale price increase after this large-scale price increase, Sony stopped updating the subscription data of PS Plus in the financial report, and the reason also pointed to the decline in the number of subscribers. So at the end of the day, the business model of console games seems to be about to run out of play in the face of rising development costs, and Sony is betting on service-oriented games, abandoning "only on playstation", and launching various peripherals, all for profit.
Microsoft's push for a full-platform game subscription service is essentially to share the cost through scale, and Sony's move seems to be just a model. Unfortunately, consoles are not the same as PCs and mobile phones, and the latter two have a more open ecosystem, and it may be difficult for more hardcore PC gamers and lighter mobile game players to buy Sony's account.
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