PlayStation Plus loses two million subscribers

Today the data related to the recent quarter of the ongoing fiscal year of Sony have been shared. As you surely remember, it was in this period, between July and September, that the new PlayStation Plus reached the market. Although many believed that this was going to mean an increase in users, we actually saw a decrease of two million players.

In total, there are 45.4 million subscribers for the three months ended on September 30, 2022. This is a decrease of 1.9 million compared to the 47.3 million registered last quarter . Along with this, the monthly active users (MAU) of PlayStation Network were also reduced to 102 million, a decrease with respect to the 104 million of the previous year and the 103 million of the last quarter. This seems to be Sony's lowest MAU figure since he began to inform this data at the beginning of 2020.

However, not all are bad news, since the income from Sony network services, where PS Plus and advertising are included, but do not buy games or additional content, increased by 10%, from ¥106 billion of yen, to ¥116 billion yen , which represents its best performance to date during a quarter. That means that Sony's game division is earning more money by subscriber than before, which is a reflection of new subscription levels and their prices.

Regarding this, Pirogi Took, Sony CFO, mentioned that the decrease in users is due to the lack of Third Party games in the last quarter , as well as the fact that people no longer spend so much time at home. This was what he mentioned:

There has been a decrease in the number of members of PlayStation Plus. However, in the second quarter we renew our services and there has been no great impulse as a whole. In addition, we did not make aggressive promotions during the second quarter.

Therefore, in the future we will have more penetration in PS5, and we will have very good titles. In addition, we can make better promotions and believe we can recover.

Now more people come out outdoors, and we still have to get out of negative cycles. PS4 and third-party software sales have also been quite slow, and catalog securities have also decreased.

Against that, PS5's commitment is quite high, so in the third quarter we expect some recovery. We have strong titles from First-Park, and we have some seasonal effects. Then, in the third quarter we can see some recovery of the downward trend: that is our expectation.

However, with the arrival of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, which had a great launch in PlayStation consoles, and god of War Ragnarök In a couple of days, it is expected that the number of PS Plus users increase during the current quarter.

On related issues, the Uncharted collection had the worst PlayStation launch on PC. Similarly, these are the PS Plus games for November.

Editor's note:

Compared to Xbox Game Pass, when the new PS Plus reached the market, there was no stir. Although the PlayStation platform already has more content today, there are still many who do not see this service as a complete need.