Just today, my Sony PlayStation Plus membership is expiring.
Like other old members, I also received an email from Sony on May 24, knowing that that day was “an important day”: the new subscription-based membership service was officially launched.
Originally I didn’t care much about Sony’s new subscription service. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo previously all had their own online membership services, with different focuses. Microsoft’s XGP is the most fragrant, with a large number of first-party third-party games joining in; Nintendo’s NS Online mainly buys an online service, which is cheaper; Sony’s PlayStation Plus not only provides online experience, but also allows new players to experience a variety of well-known games for free masterpiece.
So when I learned that Sony would provide an upgraded subscription service, I guessed that their strategy was the same as before, focusing on letting new players play the classic games that had been released, and would not really benchmark against XGP, and would launch the first Party third-party games are added to it.
Now the list of the first batch of games has been announced, whether it is the “400 models” promised at the time of the announcement or the “hundreds of models” that have been shrunk, all of which are roughly in line with this speculation, and it is indeed just an expanded version of the existing PlayStation Plus.
There should be many players like me. The members who buy PS and NS are mainly for online services, and the old games provided for free are only to be added as a bonus, to ease the little pimples of XGP in their hearts. So this time I consciously wasn’t the target user of this service, and didn’t care too much about this “important day”.
However, Sony’s confusing operation of “filling the price difference” for membership upgrade this time has still broken many old players. If old members want to upgrade the subscription service, they not only need to upgrade the entire remaining period in one go, but also have to make up for the existing purchases. All benefits of membership.
This sounds incredible. Even though I’m used to Sony treating old and new players differently, I still can’t figure out why they made this decision. The turbulent public opinion is almost inevitable, and it is difficult to say that this is a good deal.
It wasn’t until yesterday that Sony finally issued an announcement explaining that, with the help of a lot of scolding, the “technical error” was fixed. This seemingly unpredictable situation did not seem to be what they wanted to see.
In another night talk last week , we talked about “the manufacturers that everyone is scolding are still making money, and that doesn’t mean we should give up the right to shout.” Judging from the past two days, when the volume is loud enough, the scolding still works.
However, is it true that players can only repair “technical errors” and communicate their ideas with the help of scolding?
Also yesterday, Sony also released a new issue of its annual investor report, which mentioned that they will significantly increase their investment in live-service games on PS5 in the next few years. The investment ratio of online service-based games is planned to increase from 12% in 2019 to 55% in 2025. With this change, the proportion of traditional games will decrease from 88% to 45%.
If Sony seems to be still sticking to the exclusive strategy of high-spec masterpieces (even if it is only for a limited time), then from this report, we can see that their investment focus has gradually shifted to online service games. By 2022, it will be basically the same as traditional games.
The report also mentioned that Sony’s first-party studios are currently developing 12 online service games, which are planned to be fully launched in 2025. If these games are all on the scale of “Destiny 2”, it will inevitably squeeze the development space of many existing studios, and development, operation and continuous updates will require manpower.
It has been a long time since Sony has released a first-party masterpiece. Personally, what I miss most on the PS platform is a work like “God of War”. These single-player immersive games used to be what they do best, and that’s what attracted me to Sony’s exclusivity. So I want to play this type of game more than a service game, but now it may have to wait longer.
Of course, among these 12 service-oriented games launched by Sony, the explosive models they expect may also be born. According to their words, “as long as some of them succeed,” their business structure transformation will be successful.
I’m looking forward to Sony winning this big bet on transformation, and I’m not averse to service games. If the subject matter suits my appetite, I will try it without hesitation and become a tap water salesman among friends. I’ll probably renew my PlayStation Plus membership by then, but not today.
In my opinion, this comic template can be used exclusively in the white night talk of game manufacturers in the future. -CaesarZX
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