PlayStation executive Hiroki Totoki recently told investors in a Sony financial results call that the quality of its first-party games would “deteriorate” if released onto the company’s PlayStation Plus subscription service on launch day.
This news comes by way of Eurogamer, which reports that Totoki said this while also mentioning he doesn’t want to make comments on “the competitor’s strategy,” with the likely competitor being Microsoft and its Xbox Game Pass service. Xbox releases its first-party games onto Xbox Game Pass on launch day and it’s a big pull for the subscription service. PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan has revealed in the past that even with the company’s upcoming revamp of PS Plus, it does not plan to launch first party games there, and Totoki’s latest comments echo that.
“I will refrain from making comments on the competitor’s strategy,” Totoki told investors. “Our current thinking is to have development costs [and] appropriate R&D investment for quality products, and that will improve the platform and also improve the business in the long run. AAA type titles on PS5, if we distribute that on the subscription services, we may need to shrink investment needed for that and that will deteriorate the first-party title quality and that is our concern…so we want to make sure we spend the appropriate development costs to have solid products – titles – be introduced in the right manner.”
As you can see, Totoki steers clear of actually mentioning Microsoft and its Xbox Game Pass strategy, but his words are quite clear: if PlayStation were to adopt a PS Plus first-party strategy similar to that of Microsoft’s, it believes the quality of its games would drop.
Eurogamer notes that elsewhere in the financial call, Totoki said PlayStation plans to “increase software development expenses aimed at strengthening first-party software at our existing studios by approximately 40bn yen.” That translates to roughly $308 million.
“Going forward, we aim to grow the game business by strengthening our first-party software and deploying that software on multiple platforms,” Totoki said, likely alluding to PC and mobile releases, as noted by Eurogamer.
While waiting to see what that $308 million investment looks like, read about Sony’s new PlayStation Plus options launching soon that combine Plus and PlayStation Now together.
[Source: Eurogamer]
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