PlayStation Plus Expansion Pushes Sony Further Into Subscription Gaming

“We think this is a cleaner, more coherent proposition,” said PlayStation boss Jim Ryan.

Sony’s main videogame rival,

Microsoft,

has a single subscription service with multiplayer and cloud-gaming support for its Xbox users called Game Pass. It launched in 2017, and Microsoft said in January that it had 25 million subscribers.

Both Sony and Microsoft see cloud gaming, also called game streaming, as the future of game distribution. The nascent technology eliminates the need for people to download games to their devices, which takes up memory, or invest in dedicated gaming hardware such as a console or a high-end computer.

Though Microsoft’s Game Pass commonly features first-party games the same day they go on sale, subscribers to the new version of Sony’s PlayStation Plus shouldn’t expect the same. In most cases those titles will come later, according to Mr. Ryan. Featuring all new releases at launch “would not allow us to sustain the level of investment we’re making into our studios,” he said. “And it would not allow us to price the service at the level that we are pricing it at.”

Sony has been growing its game-development teams, most recently by reaching deals to acquire Bungie Inc. for $3.6 billion and Haven Studios for an undisclosed sum. Microsoft has been doing the same. In January it announced plans to purchase

Activision Blizzard Inc.

in a deal valued at about $75 billion, its largest ever by far.

Subscription services have been gaining prominence throughout the game industry. Last week,

Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.’s

Rockstar Games Studio introduced one for “Grand Theft Auto Online.”

Netflix Inc.

recently added mobile games as a free perk for subscribers to its streaming app. A few years ago,

Apple Inc.

and

Alphabet Inc.’s

Google created subscription mobile-game services for their app stores.

Sony’s move in the space is essentially a way to streamline its past offerings and potentially boost its recurring revenue stream, said

Carolina Milanesi,

an analyst at Creative Strategies Inc., a market intelligence and strategy consulting firm. “From a branding perspective, it was somewhat confusing,” she said of the company’s previous two subscription models.

Subscription services can be attractive to players because they tend to be curated and include a mix of new and classic high-quality games, said Lewis Ward, game research director at International Data Corp. “With a super-long list of options you get paralysis,” he said.

One game genre not coming soon to Sony’s PlayStation Plus or the PlayStation ecosystem is so-called play-to-earn, said Mr. Ryan. Such games involve the buying, trading and selling of virtual assets backed by nonfungible tokens, and Sony doesn’t want its many adolescent users to be able “to dabble in things that they may not understand,” he said. “This is still a very nascent area.”

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected]