The PlayStation Plus subscription numbers have topped out at 26.4 million as of the last quarter. That’s up by 27% in year-over-year growth. The news was recently reported by MCV UK coming out of Sony’s investor’s relations day.
The presentation, which is available over on Sony’s official website, outlines what their strategy is moving forward throughout the fiscal year. They have big plans to expand.
As noted in the slide above, they currently have 70 million monthly active users across their PlayStation Network services, which includes both paid subscribers and non-paying users.
It’s surprising, however, to see that their year-over-year stats for the premium service has actually increased.
I say this because Sony has been consistently receiving a lot of flak from the gaming community for their paltry offerings of free games as a bonus for subscribing to PlayStation Plus.
We’ve chronicled months – especially throughout 2016 – where gamers weren’t happy about the price of PS Plus going up back in August of 2016, or how throughout 2016 and into 2017 gamers were unhappy with the free content they were being given.
Most argue that it’s not really free content given that you have to pay a subscription fee for it, and that the subscription fee doesn’t seem to be worth the price of admission for what Sony is offering.
Even still, despite the hiccups and wallowing over the monthly game offerings, apparently the premium multiplayer service is just too much for most gamers to pass up.
A lot of this is likely due to the fact that the PS4 is the market frontrunner right now, and if you want to play online games with your friends, PSN is where it’s done. Sony has managed deals with Activision for Call of Duty, and have secured exclusive deals for games like Destiny 2, so quite naturally if people wanted in on the action they would have to pony up and pay Sony for the subscription. But given the fact that there’s a good contingent of people unhappy with the monthly offerings – opposite of the feedback that Microsoft gets for their Games With Gold deals – it seems like some people may be subscribing out of the necessity to play online rather than the quality of the content that Sony is offering up.
