Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
Sony CFO Hikori Totoki reaffirmed the company’s position on releasing its first-party AAA games on day one, as part of a subscription.
Sony’s revamped PlayStation Plus will roll out this June. It will offer subscribers a library of hundreds of games, but it won’t feature new exclusive releases. Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, of course, does offer its first-party games on launch. (Though, it must be said, there aren’t all that many of them at the moment.)
During a recent earnings call, Totoki said:
“I will refrain from making comments on the competitors’ strategy. 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.”
Totoki then went on to say that such a practice would compromise the quality of Sony’s first-party AAA titles:
“AAA type titles on PS5, if we distribute that on the subscription services, we may need to shrink the investment needed for that and that will deteriorate the first-party title quality and that is our concern.”
The upcoming PS Plus is halfway between a Game Pass competitor and something more comparable to Nintendo’s Switch Online catalogue. That service gives players a library of NES, SNES, N64, and Megadrive games for a monthly (or yearly) fee. Sony, meanwhile, has a roster of PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 games. It also offers PlayStation 3 games via streaming, because that console had a very bonkers processor that makes backwards compatability very difficult.
