Sony seems keen to exploit Bungie’s heritage by leaning hard on genres and stylings that have been proven to draw a service game audience on PlayStation - specifically sci-fi shooters. There’s a striking tonal and genre similarity between these projects, too. Little is known about these games, but Marathon has explicitly been set up to be a long-term “living” game, and it doesn’t seem like a stretch to put Fairgame$ and Concord in the same bucket. Concord, a PvP multiplayer shooter from recent acquisition Firewalk Studios, which was founded by Bungie and Destiny veterans.Marathon, Bungie’s sci-fi extraction shooter.Fairgame$, a punky extraction shooter from recent acquisition Haven Studios.Lo and behold, in terms of new reveals from first-party PlayStation studios, the showcase gave us: The PlayStation owner has been vocal about its desire to get into the business of live-service games in a big way, and how this motivated its acquisition of Destiny maker Bungie. It’s more interesting to look at the substance of the games shown, and what those can tell us about the two platform holders’ priorities. Like its rival has this summer, Sony will probably be able to bounce back in a year’s time. But there’s only so much you can read into this - the most plausible conclusion is simply that post-pandemic production issues are hitting Sony’s family of studios a year or so later than they hit Microsoft’s and Ubisoft’s, leaving it with a gap between this year’s Spider-Man 2 and far-off prospects like Bungie’s Marathon. Most observers feel that Xbox had the better show, in terms of the number and range of titles shown and the promise of its future slate. I, for one, am still waiting for more PS1 games to be added to the service as promised before I'll upgrade my membership from Extra to Premium.Now that the dust has settled on Xbox’s and PlayStation’s big summer showcases, it’s a good time to compare them and look for evidence of where each company is heading - or thinks it’s heading.Īs has increasingly been the case over the last few years, the two presentations were very different. Whether we'll see the company add in more content, more discounts, or something else entirely in order to provoke that remains to be seen. So what is Sony's goal then? It'll likely be to convert as many people already included in the PlayStation ecosystem to PS Plus subscribers, at the highest tier possible. Sony revealed its PS Plus subs numbers, only recently. So that's still more than the number of players that are subbed to Xbox Game Pass – but Sony's upper tier subscriber figures, then, must be far lower than what you'd have previously expected from those numbers. Will Xbox Game Pass continue to dominate Sony's alternative?Įarlier this year, we heard that PSN topped 100 million users – so that means there's a swathe of people out there attached to PlayStation's online infrastructure that aren't necessarily subscribed to PS Plus.ĭata shown in Sony's November 2022 earnings presentation revealed that the number of people subscribing to Sony’s PlayStation Plus has fallen from from 47.3 million to 45.4 million this quarter. Given it's "expected to grow substantially in the future," too, you can see why Sony is looking at it with cautious eyes. So that means the service has added 4 million more members in under 12 months. It's worth noting that the last official figures we heard from Microsoft about Game Pass suggested the service was at 25 million subs – and that was back in January this year. The multi-game subscription tiers of PlayStation Plus considerably lag " Game Pass has 29 million subscribers to Xbox Game Pass console and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and is expected to grow substantially in the future. "Microsoft already has a substantial lead in multi-game subscription services. "Game Pass leads PlayStation Plus significantly," Sony writes in its reply to the CMA. Just what is PS Plus and its new tiers, then? Why should you care?Īs part of a new development in the messy enquiry into whether Microsoft should be allowed to acquire Activsion Blizzard, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority has published Sony's response to the authority's Issues Statement, and it revealed quite a lot of important information about the subscriptions arms race the two platform-holders are engaged in. Do you think Sony's new PlayStation Plus setup is decent? Do you think splitting the tiers into Essential, Extra, and Premium was a wise move from the Sony tacticians? Well, your thoughts aside, it seems the public reaction to the new subscription service hasn't quite made the impact Sony hoped it would.
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