Sony has already said it has no interest in releasing brand-new titles directly onto the service at launch, as Microsoft does with its service.The plan is to add more to all three tiers at a constant clip once a month, but if this is the launch slate's most impressive standouts, it doesn't feel anywhere near ready to compete with Xbox Game Pass. Sony has promised more than 700 games on PlayStation Plus, but right now there are just a little over 100 titles confirmed at launch, many of which its diehard fan base likely already owns.The hurdle, however, will be keeping customers signed up. If you don’t own Spider-Man: Miles Morales or Ghost of Tsushima, it’s far cheaper to pay Sony $15 to play either title for one month than to buy it outright. Unlike with television, film and music, the cost of a single game far exceeds that of a standard subscription. Game subscription services aren’t tough sells, at first. To adjust to a changing industry that’s placing a higher premium on recurring revenue, Sony needed a more enticing offering, and one it can grow over time. But that number has declined to 47.4 million in its latest quarter. Sony reported 47.6 million PlayStation Plus subscribers as of June of last year.The other benefit to PlayStation Plus has been a small handful of monthly free games, but Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass offers hundreds of free games for between $10 and $15 a month, pressuring Sony over the years to respond with something more substantive.The most popular games on PlayStation, like Fortnite, don’t require Sony's subscription to play. With the rise of free-to-play gaming, the value proposition for paying $60 a year or $10 a month for PlayStation Plus made less and less sense as time went on.Similar to Xbox Live Gold, PlayStation Plus was primarily a way for Sony to monetize the online services of its console hardware, including online multiplayer features. PlayStation Plus has grown stale, and its value has diminished, so a revamp was definitely necessary. “The list of Classic PlayStation Games coming to Sony's new tiers of service read like they were chosen by a company that really thinks you hate old games and won't ever bother to play them,” Giant Bomb co-founder Jeff Gerstmann tweeted.The slim selection and confusing tier differences make the effort feel slapdash, unfocused and incomplete, and I'm curious why Sony didn't detail the whole collection all at once. PS2 games are mysteriously absent, save an assortment of remasters released for the PS4. The announcement listed only 29 titles available to stream, and just 28 downloadable games from older hardware generations.The entire pitch for Premium is cloud gaming, with an assortment of PS3 games available via streaming, but the confirmed launch catalog is filled with arbitrary additions and just a single PSP game.Most of the games are at least a year old, and some far older. Across those tiers, two of them - PlayStation Plus Extra and PlayStation Plus Premium - offer the same catalog of free PS4 and PS5 games to download, though Premium will also offer classic games via both downloading and streaming. There will now be three tiers where there used to be just one.The whole thing is a confusing mess, to put it lightly. The company on Monday finally revealed a partial list of bundled games it plans to make available at launch for the higher-priced tiers of PlayStation Plus, costing $15 and $18 a month. That brings us to PlayStation Plus, and how Sony is positioning the revamped subscription service as the launch approaches at the end of the month. ![]() As for whether subscriptions represent a promising new distribution model in the game industry, well … Sony’s top PlayStation exec thinks the jury is still out on that one. ![]() For the PlayStation maker, these services will always come second to its bread and butter: selling full price games at retail for as long as it can maintain high prices and healthy margins. Sony has made its stance on subscription gaming loud and clear. PlayStation Plus annual plans are slapdash, but cheap
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