Why would they expect better sales in the first place? Release a game on PS Plus, traditional sales for the game goes down/flatline. Makes sense to me.
People would rather get more games they can play plus games they can keep for less money than a new game per month instead of paying full price for new launches which have been historically broken or unfinished on release. This and more about how grass is green at 11.
This is not what the article or Sony are saying. In fact, this article is about Sony starting to put first-party games on ps plus causing sales losses. Ps plus has existed for a decade without first-party games and did not cause sale losses.
It’s maddening that people leave comments like this without even reading the article and that people will press the up button on it. This is reddit behaviour and it’s what turned reddit fucking awful.
Yeah, this information is an indictment of the potential loss in revenue that services like PS+ and Gamepass are causing to those games and developers participating in these services. The only way that adding your launch game to a subscription service is if you think you’ll make more money from the publisher for the exclusivity than you would with a direct to consumer approach.
For smaller games and devs, there is clearly an upside to making these agreements with PS+/Gamepass in terms of money upfront, marketing, and immediate access to a large player base that has a near-zero cost of entry. For first party games though, it does not make financial sense (at least at launch) to add these games. Launch games added to these services are clearly doing so at a short-term loss in exchange for a potential portion of the future subscription pie market share.
Ps plus has existed for a decade without first-party games and did not cause sale losses.
I can’t really speak for what PS Now looked like in 2014 (it wasn’t available in my region, PS+ Premium still isn’t either), but PS+ launched with these titles from their first 12 months:
- WipEout HD
- Syphon Filter
- Syphon Filter 3
- Sackboy’s Prehistoric Moves
- Crash Team Racing
- Spyro the Dragon
- Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage!
- Spyro: Year of the Dragon
Sony’s first party games aren’t really broken on release. PC ports are more of a mixed bag, but they know and use their own hardware and tools well.
This article also doesn’t say plus hurts their launch or early sales. It says people mostly stop buying the games when they get added to extra.
Which makes a lot of sense. If you are someone that waits until a game is on PS Plus to play it, I don’t imagine you planned on ever buying the game to keep. There may be a small portion of gamers that enjoyed the game after playing it and purchase a copy to keep but that obviously is not a massive group.
Do they even take first party stuff off? I haven’t been paying attention to the library, but I was kind of assuming they were waiting until they decided it had sold what it would then put it in “permanently”.
FWIW either way I prefer their approach to Microsoft’s. I think expecting designing games expecting people to actually buy them is part of their ability to keep proper single player experiences without drowning it in GaaS. Admittedly I thought Microsoft’s catalogue kind of sucked before Gamepass too, so maybe it’s a coincidence. But while I’m actually currently subscribed to premium because I’m a Madden addict and $60 more on Black Friday for their catalogue wasn’t bad, I’m perfectly happy paying for games on top of it if it means they’re making stuff like the last of us and horizon. I still generally won’t buy it day one (and will likely buy third party games on Steam unless they have issues on Linux or use the dual shock features well), but I like the balance they strike with their game design, giving games development time to really build immersive experiences, mostly without grubbing for extra cash (though the last of us had obnoxious purchases for the multiplayer). I’d be scared “day one subscription” would result in them breaking design to claw back revenue.
