One of the documents contained in the Insomniac Games hack offers an in-depth presentation of Sony’s PlayStation Plus. First in its current form, but also the future that the firm sees for its subscription service.
The PlayStation Plus subscription service has evolved a lot since the launch of the PS5. It now offers three subscription levels: Essential, Extra and Premium, with Sony’s first response to Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass. We discover in a document contained in the Insomniac Games hack, all of the manufacturer’s ambition for the future of its service.
As a reminder, Insomniac Games and Sony were victims of a ransomware hack and refused to pay the ransom. More than 1.67 TB of internal studio documents behind Marvel’s Spider-Man And Ratchet & Clank found themselves available on the Internet. In the press, this provoked a debate on how to treat or not treat this information resulting from a crime. Frandroid has chosen not to share images of a game in development due to lack of context and out of empathy for the studio’s developers directly affected by this hack a few days before Christmas. On the other hand, strategic information from Insomniac and Sony, on the budgets allocated to game development, sales and even the brand’s editorial choices, are a rare opportunity to better understand certain secrets of the industry. We therefore decided to cover this information, which concerns companies more than their workers.
PS Plus 3.0: extend subscription to new platforms
A PDF document contained in the hack dating from April 2023 allows you to discover Sony’s objective with PlayStation Plus. We start from the current formula with its three subscription levels to arrive at a stage in the future of “Services 3.0”. The vision is to become “the most exciting and desirable” subscription entertainment service in the world. Icons including music, cinema and video games make us understand that the ambition of PlayStation Plus goes beyond the simple console. It should be noted that this vision appears to be from 2021 based on the screenshot slide.
The ideas contained here, however, are continued on slides attributed to 2022 and 2023. We find the idea of extending the PlayStation Plus service beyond its current borders. The presentation explicitly mentions the arrival of the service on PC, with more and more PlayStation Studios games on the platform, a connection with mobile and the arrival of video game streaming directly to browser and television. Today, this is one of the major limitations of the PlayStation Plus Premium subscription. You can only access cloud gaming games on PlayStation console and PC. Even the recent PlayStation Portal cannot access these games.
This expansion of PlayStation Plus would be a major strategic choice for Sony. Since the start of the generation, the firm has done everything to keep the game console at the center of its ecosystem. The PlayStation VR 2 or the PlayStation Portal can only interact with a PlayStation 5. The arrival of PlayStation Plus on PC would completely change this perspective and would more directly respond to Microsoft’s strategy. In this presentation, Sony would also like to attract more games services or free to play in its subscription offer. This is what services like Amazon Prime or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate do by offering content for these games to their subscribers.
More than PlayStation Plus
We said above, Sony would also like to go beyond video games with its subscription offer. The firm has already tried in the past by adding films to its service, and has increased the number of purchases of anime services. In its internal presentation, Sony mentions potential partnerships with Spotify, Disney+ or even Crunchyroll and the following idea “can we extend PlayStation Plus to non-console owners?” »
Expanding PS Plus could also be done in video games. Still with the idea of partnerships, Sony is considering integrating other formulas like GTA+ or Fortnite Crew into its service. This is a bit of what the firm ended up doing with its partnership with Ubisoft. Opposite, Microsoft is integrating the EA Play subscription into Xbox Game Pass on PC and Ultimate.
Will Sony really follow this strategy?
From its acquisitions and its various tests with PlayStation Plus, it is clear that Sony had all these ambitions for its PlayStation Plus subscription. But will the firm really develop its service in this way as frontally as Microsoft has been able to do in recent years? Although this document is relatively recent, we must not forget that companies can evolve their strategy. In this case, PlayStation is on the verge of a change of boss, who could perhaps breathe new life into the group. In addition, we recently understood that Sony had backed down on its ambitions in terms of online games or game services. With fewer games of this type planned in the coming years, the firm will perhaps review the direction of its associated service.
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