PS Plus Revenue Is on the Up Following 2022's Multi-Tiered Overhaul

Increase price, increase revenue. Very happy.

Revenue is up (due to price hike) but users are down, which is why they stopped reporting numbers.

I'm really happy with essentials tier so far: Sifu, Tunic, Immortals of Aveum, Rolledrome, A Plague Tale Requiem...
Even if some of them disappointed me, i payed 30+ games for the price of a single new AAA game.
On the other hand i'm not really interested in Extra or Premium

I dropped to the lowest tier. The value just wasn't there for me. If you rarely buy games I could see it being better. Not for me.

@Solingo_Bill I'm happy with my sub as well and plan to be subbed for a long time, for £10.99 a month I can't complain with getting 3-4 free games and a rotating catalogue of hundreds of games. If anything I just want them to consistently add more day one indies to the service.

@TrickyDicky99 The price hike was only for 12 month subscription plans, so I doubt that made much of a difference to total users, maybe a mil or two but that might change monthly depending on what games get added.

I’m no businessman, but just because PS+ revenue increased since going to the 3-tier system, did profits from the service increase? I can only imagine the cost/expenses of running the new service went up dramatically in order to get the contracts and payouts for all those Extra and Premium games. Did the new revenue cover the increased costs? Just wondering.

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Edit: This doesn’t answer the PS+ profitability question specifically, but in looking at the other article it states “Sony's sales and operating income for FY23 are up 12 percent and five per cent respectively… As it looks ahead to FY24, Sony forecasts a fairly static revenue figure, but expects profits to continue to grow.”

So the sales/revenue has grown more than the profits overall for the company as a whole, which does tell me that the operating costs have increased faster than the revenue. They expect a “static revenue” but growing profits. That can only mean their profit strategy is to have cut costs (layoffs/closures/cheaper contracts with third parties/etc)

@UltimateOtaku91 Over the years i built a library of about 200 games thanks to ps plus essentials. When i want something new to play but don't want to spend more money, i just open my catalogue anche choose one.
The fact that Essentials game don't expire is just so good

@Th3solution As per their report a lot of that lower profit was because of the aggressive sales in multiple regions. This FY they plan to again sell the PS5 at full price which means they make more money.

I've still not been enticed to move off the base tier of PSN. I don't even play online anymore, kinda stayed on it out of habit.

@UltimateOtaku91 The amount of subs was decreasing for a year or two and then Sony all of a sudden decided to stop reporting the numbers despite reporting them ever since they started . . . coincidence I think not.

Yeah. We all know why the revenue is up. I stacked my sub through next year before the price hike. Not sure I'm going to reup again.

@breakneck Yeah, that makes sense that more consoles sold at MSRP will increase revenue. But the articles says Sony expects “static revenue but growing profits.” So, same amount of money coming in, in total, but better profits. As far as hardware sales go, perhaps that means they are predicting they can produce consoles at a lower cost to them and still sell at the same price?

I have used the extra service for a year, and I've only played 4-5 games. Too many good releases like FF7 Rebirth, Diablo 4 or good discounts on older games that are not on the tier prevented me from using the service to get the true value. I have gone back to the base tier as the games they provide are still great. Online play doesn't interest me anymore.

Premium needs more work to get me to pay for that and I'm not interested in Cloud gaming or playing retro games from my childhood.

@Th3solution “ perhaps that means they are predicting they can produce consoles at a lower cost to them and still sell at the same price? “

My memory doesn’t work well anymore so I’m not great at time keeping but they already did this when they stopped selling the 2 different skus, w/ and w/o the disc drive, and started selling the 2 new models, which are the same model, w/ and w/o the disc drive. It probably cost them some money to switch over from one to the next just in box manufacturing alone. So going forward that’s done, and this model is probably cheaper to produce. Not sure how Pro will affect their bottom line but they might?

“ It's worth noting the price increase of the service, which saw all three tiers gain larger price tags last summer.”

This should have been the title of article - “ PS+ Raises Prices, Takes in More Money “. 🤑

Wait, they report "PS Plus and advertising" together as a single number? What is that? Is that like when Xbox started reporting as "hardware" mixed with Surface laptops and mice? How is advertising and plus subscriptions in any way related as a report item? And how does that not set off alarm bells of shrinking numbers?

So lower numbers, high revenue after price hike, and higher MAU due to PC free accounts?

At least it's not just customers, investors are being taken for a ride, too.

Yes yes, let's cheerlead corporate profits via rate hikes. 👌

I finally let go of ps plus this month. It's just not something I was getting actual value from. Sure there was a handful of games I wasn't interested enough to buy that I got to try but ultimately one clear problem exists that makes the model pretty valueless for me especially with the price gouging:

Most of what is on offer is old stuff I've already played because I wanted to play it near or shortly after release or got on steep discount. Not enough new is being added to the library because their isn't much new to add as the ps suite has slowed due to bloated dev time. Them shunning investing in day 1 releases yet charging more only makes this worse.

It's just not worth it for me to shill out what they are asking when in reality if there is something I actually want to play that comes along I could just pay a one month fee or buy it on sale or used, play it and move on.

@TrickyDicky99 actually there was a 30% of a price increase and they have almost about of 30% increase in ps plus revenue. So the decline on users YOY should be small. Of course on this we have to consider that 20mil new consoles have been sold, though most of them should be transitioning from ps4.

I’ve been subbed to the premium tier since launch. I’m also an avid trophy hunter so when I reach 100% trophies on a game I move on (GT7 is the only game to never be deleted from my ssd). PS plus is perfect for it. Lots of easy/hard platinums to go for and some top draw stuff. I run 2 platinums side by side and I’m currently on 2 games both off PS Plus, Ghost Recon Breakpoint (fantastic on PS5 at 60fps) and the tremendous Demons Souls remake…wow wow wow let’s go

@Th3solution My guess is that 3rd party PS exclusives/marketing deals are coming to an end (like CoD marketing has come to an end and no more Square Enix exclusivity from next month outside of Foamstars) but people still naturally come to PS5 anyway.

Im subscribed to the premium tier. I think the amount of games is very decent, and streaming works very well. But I don't think i will continue once the year is over. Moneywise i would have been better off just buying games on discount or secondhanded.

I'm currently subscribed to Extra, but only because it was on sale for the same price as Essential so it was a no brainer