With the launch of PlayStation's new subscription service, PlayStation CEO Jim Lane was interviewed by foreign media, explaining that Sony's first-party new work will not join the PS+ new subscription service when it debuts, and explaining why.
I feel like our studio is in a virtuous circle. Invest in development, win success, and continue to invest more, thus ushering in greater success. We love the loop and think our players love it too.
Add our game to this service at launch, or any other of our services... As you know, this is not the path we have taken in the past. That's not the path we're going to take with this new service.
I think if we put PlayStation Studios' games in there, then the virtuous circle is broken. We couldn't have invested that much money in the studio, and we thought the knock-on effect would be on the quality of our games, which wasn't what players wanted.
But Jim Lane didn't put the words to death, saying the industry is changing rapidly:
I'm not going to settle things down at this stage. All the initiatives I have talked about today are our measures in the short term. Our distribution model is now working, but it doesn't make sense. We all know that everything in the industry changes so quickly.
In the interview, Jim revealed that more than two-thirds of PS+ subscribers now subscribe to PS+ on a 12-month cycle.
For this group of users, if they continue to subscribe to PS+ Extra ($99.99/year) or PS+ Premium ($119.99/year) for years, their monthly subscription fees are $8.33 and $9.99, respectively.
We believe that this price is worth the money for the content that players get from the subscription service. If we added the first game launch of a (first-party) studio to a subscription service, we wouldn't have this price.