It hasn’t been the best week for Sony PlayStation.
First up, they revealed in their most recent quarterly financial results that despite the more GamePass-like multi-tier revamp of its PlayStation Plus service, subscribers to PlayStation Plus declined for the third quarter in a row – down 4% to 45.4 million from 47.3 million last quarter.
On the other hand, revenue per subscriber is up 21% year over – that makes it Sony’s best quarter for subscription revenue yet (ie. it is making more money with fewer subscribers). According to VGC, Sony’s CFO Hiroki Totoki blamed declining third-party game sales and declining PlayStation 4 user engagement (PS5 engagement is remaining strong).
Things are expected to turn around with the one-two punch of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” and PS exclusive “God of War: Ragnarok” both hitting in next quarter’s results.
Things also didn’t go well for Sony on PC this past weekend with the ultra-quiet launch of “Sackboy: A Big Adventure”. Despite strong reviews, the game has had a fizzer of a PC launch, with its Steam concurrent player count peaking at just 610 players for its opening weekend.
That’s significantly down from the disappointing 10,733 that the week before’s “Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves” collection launch pulled in and the heights of 73,000 that the “God of War” reboot snagged back in January.
Whether this will have an impact on Sony’s push into PC isn’t clear, telling will be how well “Spider-Man: Miles Morales” does when it hits PC later this month.
