Sony CFO Hikori Totoki reaffirmed the company’s position on releasing its first-party AAA games on day one, as part of a subscription.
Sony’s revamped PlayStation Plus will roll out this June. It will offer subscribers a library of hundreds of games, but it won’t feature new exclusive releases. Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, of course, does offer its first-party games on launch. (Though, it must be said, there aren’t all that many of them at the moment.)
During a recent earnings call, Totoki said:
“I will refrain from making comments on the competitors’ strategy. Our current thinking is to have development costs [and] appropriate R&D investment for quality products, and that will improve the platform and also improve the business in the long run.”
Totoki then went on to say that such a practice would compromise the quality of Sony’s first-party AAA titles:
“AAA type titles on PS5, if we distribute that on the subscription services, we may need to shrink the investment needed for that and that will deteriorate the first-party title quality and that is our concern.”
The upcoming PS Plus is halfway between a Game Pass competitor and something more comparable to Nintendo’s Switch Online catalogue. That service gives players a library of NES, SNES, N64, and Megadrive games for a monthly (or yearly) fee. Sony, meanwhile, has a roster of PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 games. It also offers PlayStation 3 games via streaming, because that console had a very bonkers processor that makes backwards compatability very difficult.
