Sony’s approach to the gaming membership market was fairly slow, it’s reasonable to say, taking a long while to revamp its PlayStation Plus offering to compete with Xbox Game Pass.
Now that its newly reorganised PS Plus system is out there, though, it’s interesting to hear PlayStation reiterating that it will continue to do things a little differently to Xbox.
The big bone of contention is around major releases, which on Xbox Game Pass drop at no extra cost on day one, a situation that PlayStation doesn’t want to replicate.
At a recent conference, Head of Independent Developer Initiatives at PlayStation, Shuhei Yoshida, discussed Sony’s refusal to add major releases at no extra cost on release day.
He said it pretty simply, too – “We believe in the premium release of a title at launch and after maybe six months, or three months, or three years, when the game’s sales come down, inclusion into this service, PS Plus Extra, can help introduce these games to new, broader audiences.”
It’s a worthwhile point, too – while Xbox Game Pass rightly shines a light on some releases that might not otherwise get acclaim, it’s also true that each month games come out onto the service without much of a ripple, something Sony would be keen to avoid.
Smaller games might still occasionally arrive early on, though – after all, Stray did so to roaring success earlier this year. However, it doesn’t sound as though the likes of God of War Ragnarok or Spider-Man 2 will follow in its pawprints.