Sony embraces a subscription system

Image source @ Visual China

| Gamewower

On the evening of March 29, Sony officially announced that it plans to integrate the existing PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now into the new PlayStation Plus subscription service in June this year, and divide it into three different priced membership level services.

Subscription systems and cloud services are not new words, and Sony's choice to further embrace subscription services is not a big strategic adjustment to imitate competitors. Under the rapid changes in the market environment, content manufacturers and platforms are making changes according to the situation and constantly adjusting development strategies, and the reform in this process will inevitably cause the collision of different views.

Consolidate existing services and upgrades

From the introduction point of view, the new PS Plus subscription service includes three levels of basic, upgrade, and premium, and some markets also have a premium weakened version that removes cloud streaming.

The basic level is the same as the current PS Plus membership benefits, such as the ability to download two games for free every month, exclusive discounts, cloud storage space for saved games, access to multiplayer online games, and so on.

The upgraded version is based on the former and adds 400 PS4 and PS5 games.

Premium Edition further provides PS3 games through cloud streaming, providing classic game streaming and download options in the original PS, PS2 and PSP, and cloud streaming access to upgraded and original PlayStation, PS2, PSP and PS4 games included in the premium tier in the market where PlayStation Now is currently available. Players can use PS4 and PS5 consoles as well as computers to stream games.

The key words are summarized, including the use of cloud streaming to provide more "old" content to fill the user machine.

The environment, vendors and users

GamesIndustry's consolidated 2021 Global Gaming Market Report last year mentioned that the PC market was $36.7 billion, down 0.8% year-over-year; the console market was $50.4 billion, down 6.6% year-over-year. In the January 2022 survey released by NPD, hardware sales increased by 22% year-on-year and content software sales fell by 4% under the overall relative stability of the console market revenue.

This can actually lead to an interesting conclusion, the slow growth of the host market in the past two years is actually more driven by hardware sales, and there has been a certain bottleneck in content growth.

In addition to the lack of new content caused by the impact of the epidemic on the construction period, the game value theory believes that manufacturers choose cross-platform sales strategies and users choose lower-priced purchase methods.

As we mentioned earlier, can the core players in the buyout system feed the manufacturers with huge investment? This problem has forced traditional manufacturers to change their marketing strategies in addition to the change of the payment model, and seek transformation, including authorizing IP to cooperate in the development of mobile games and the adoption of large-scale cross-platform sales strategies.

To give two examples, one of the reasons for the overwhelming number of bad reviews at the beginning of the 2077 launch is that there is more emphasis on the bad experience of PCs ignoring host optimization and causing bugs to run rampant. Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad once said on Twitter that 2077 has made a good start in China, and the Chinese market was at some point the largest market for the PC version of 2077 and maintained strong sales on the first day of release. It also said in the article that the vast majority of domestic players choose to download on the Steam platform or import games from other parts of Asia and the US market.

ADAM Kiciński, CEO of a conference call, admitted, "We underestimated the scale and complexity of the problem, and we ignored the signals [during development] that the game needed to be improved while running on the original last-gen console." This is a wrong approach and goes against our business philosophy. Most importantly, during the publicity period, we mainly presented the game on the PC platform, which made us lose the trust of our players and damaged the reputation that the company had worked hard to build for a long time. ”

Recently, more than 2 weeks after the launch of "Eldon's Law Ring", the official official announced that the total sales exceeded 12 million copies, and according to Steamspy's data, its Steam sales exceeded 10 million copies in the same period, in short, the sales of the PC version of the game far exceeded the console version.

In order to survive, there is no problem for vendors to choose a cross-platform sales strategy, but the behavior of most users will choose a lower paid experience will inevitably lead to the impact of the PC version on the revenue of the host version of the content.

Explore and continue to change

The industry report of the 2021 global hosting market released by Ampere Analysis at the beginning of the year shows that although the buyout system occupies an absolute mainstream position in the charging model, contributing 81% of the revenue share in 2021, the subscription service has increased by 20% year-on-year with 2020, showing a continuous upward trend.

Choosing a subscription system essentially responds to changes in the needs of partners and users.

It is worth noting that from the current introduction released by Sony, in addition to cloud streaming, taking out old content from the past to fill the new machines purchased by users, these accumulations are a fortune. Its core is also to alleviate the problem of lack of content, to form a certain content difference in the host including PC competition, and to dump at a low price to serve new users or to cater to the market trend of stimulating hardware sales.

The question of the launch of the new game and when to join has not been given a clear answer, which obviously does not meet the core needs of old users. In addition, it was mentioned in the previous article "Panic Independent Developers" that in the environment where the overall market development of PCs and consoles is bottlenecked, developers choose to sell separately and compete with the bottom-by-bottom competition of the subscription model of large channels, and have different opinions around the perceived value of independent games, which will become a new problem of choosing to embrace the subscription system.

In any case, under the change of market environment, the strategy of manufacturers and the needs of mainstream users are changing, and the platform cannot be independent. Even if the seemingly reckless staking will eventually return to sustainable development, there will be more problems to be solved and adjusted on the road to promoting the subscription system.