Updated PlayStation Plus: a rough start

As you know, in June this year Sony launched the updated PlayStation Plus service: it introduced additional tariff plans with access to hundreds of games, while the original version did not go anywhere and turned into the cheapest PS Plus Essential tariff. But the “relaunch” of PlayStation Plus turned out to be difficult – at least in the first months.

So, according to the financial statement company, the number of subscribers to the service decreased from 47.3 million to 45.4 million in the last quarter — this is the third quarter in a row with such a trend, so we can conclude that, at least initially, Sony failed to improve the situation by introducing new tariffs.

However, not everything is so bad: despite the decrease in the audience of PlayStation Plus, the profit from “network services” (which includes PS Plus itself, advertising on the PlayStation Network and the now obsolete PlayStation Now) for the last quarter compared to last year increased from 100 billion to 117 billion yen (from approximately $679 million to $794 million).

It also became known that Sony has already sold 25 million PlayStation 5, of which 3.3 million — in the last third quarter (the same as in the third quarter of last year). Games on physical media were sold 20% less than last year: 62.5 million copies; at the same time, gaming revenue in general increased from 645.4 to 720.7 billion yen (from approximately $4.4 to $4.9 billion).