New subscription levels, free content and many other bonuses: Sony’s PlayStation Plus program should actually be booming. But as a new financial report suggests, user numbers are going down.
In June of this year, PlayStation Plus underwent a makeover. Sony relaunched the program with the three new subscription levels Essential, Extra and Premium. The goal behind the realignment should be relatively clear: getting more users to subscribe. However, as last year’s financial report suggests, this tactic has not worked. On the contrary.
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The number of users has therefore been declining since June 2022. In hard terms, Sony lost 1.8 million subscribers over the past three months, down about four percent. The number of users has shrunk from 47.3 million to 45.5 million.
Where such losses occur, there are of course attempts to explain them. Sony itself states that the engagement of PlayStation 4 users would decrease more than expected. This is surprising in that the old console is still supplied with some blockbusters. For example, she gets titles like Horizon: Forbidden West, Gran Turismo 7 and the upcoming God of War Ragnarök.
In return, Sony states that the percentage of PlayStation Plus subscribers on the PS5 is significantly higher. Accordingly, one wants to spend a lot of effort to push the number of users on the current console even further up and thus counteract the downward trend.
However, one factor should become a problem: the PS5 is still very difficult to obtain, both online and in specialist shops it is very rarely in stock. However, the scarcity of resources is said to have improved significantly, which is why Sony was able to increase production to 6.5 million devices in the second quarter of 2022 and thus significantly exceed its own forecasts.
Sony has announced the lineup of PlayStation Plus Essential free games for October 2022.
