Sony may have to go back to the drawing board after their latest sales flop has been made public knowledge. According to the company, they have sold more than 25 million copies of their Playstation 5, but have lost almost two million subscribers to Playstation Plus. Sony recently added three tiers of paid subscription services in June, and the freefall occurred between July and September.
Sony joins the likes of Netflix, who had a tough first quarter this year- losing more than 200,000 subscribers and projected to lose 2 million more. The Playstation Network also saw a huge drop in engagement with one million fewer active users in this last quarter.
Although the new tier system has not been crowned an official success, Playstation Plus revenue has increased by 10%, which can be attributed to the price tag attached to the amenities. The Platinum Tier costs $119.99 a year in exchange for access to classic Playstation games that are available for different generations of the game system.
Sony’s CEO is hopeful that this next quarter will see better results:
“The number of PlayStation Plus subscriber accounts at the end of September decreased 4% from the end of June to 45.4 million accounts. We see that this decrease results from a greater decline in user engagement among PlayStation 4 (PS4) users than expected.
“On the other hand, the ratio of PS Plus subscribers among PlayStation 5 (PS5) users remains at a level significantly higher than that of PS4. We are putting even more effort into accelerating the penetration of PS5 hardware to recover this user engagement going forward.”
