Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan said that day one PlayStation Plus games won’t be a thing for their new subscription service.
Ryan said the following:
We feel like we are in a good virtuous cycle with the studios where the investment delivers success, which enables yet more investment, which delivers yet more success. We like that cycle and we think our gamers like that cycle.
[In terms of] putting our own games into this service, or any of our services, upon their release… as you well know, this is not a road that we’ve gone down in the past. And it’s not a road that we’re going to go down with this new service. We feel if we were to do that with the games that we make at PlayStation Studios, that virtuous cycle will be broken. The level of investment that we need to make in our studios would not be possible, and we think the knock-on effect on the quality of the games that we make would not be something that gamers want.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
The reason for the lack of day one PlayStation Plus games appears to be that they want to see revenue coming from game sales. It’s a valid point. If you put a title into Game Pass, people will pay $15 a month to play it versus the $60 to purchase the game specifically.
There is a counterargument to this. Games that launch in Xbox Game Pass have shown that they can still sell well. Halo Infinite, for example, was the second best-selling game of December 2021. It only lost out to Call of Duty: Vanguard, a title that it wasn’t going to top anyway.
It is important to know that the stance against day one PlayStation Plus games isn’t permanent. “The way our publishing model works right now [putting new games straight into PS plus] doesn’t make any sense,” Ryan added to GamesIndustry.biz. “But things can change very quickly in this industry.”
