Perhaps if the new PS+ is a success, Sony will be able to make the step towards larger Day One inclusions- we shall have to wait and see…Īnother situation we can study is when a game leaves Game Pass and later returns - Outer Wilds is an example of this:Ī 61% decrease for Game Pass, and a lower (but still significant) 49% for PS+/PS Now. On the other hand with Microsoft being a much larger company financially they can afford this investment, even making large scale acquisitions such as Activision giving them more control over the market. Sony CFO Hikori Totoki explains that to afford putting AAA games on PS+ Day One, cutbacks to investment in the game's production would deteriorate the game quality.

Sony choosing such a small game as their debut Day One release makes sense - as discussed here by Gamerant, the scale of Sony compared to Microsoft explains why Sony might not be able to afford AAA releases Day One. With PS Now having a fraction of the subscribers Game Pass has, it raises the question how well this service could do if it had bigger games available Day One, as Game Pass does. In its first month and a half, the game saw 5x as many players on PlayStation as on Xbox - in comparison, Back 4 Blood was already seeing 10x the players on Game Pass as PlayStation in the same amount of time into its release (especially impressive given PlayStation as a platform is 1.5-2x the size of Xbox by user count).

PlayStation’s reactive move is the new and improved PlayStation Plus (PS+), and so in this blog we will take a look at both console's subscriptions as they currently stand and investigate how inclusion on these services impacts player engagement.

Xbox X|S even outperformed PS5 within February of this year. Xbox has been gaining on PlayStation in recent times and clawing its way back with console sales since the dreaded ‘Xbone’ as shown by VGChartz. As the primary goal in the console wars becomes who can maintain and grow their Monthly Active Users (MAU), these are the tools both PlayStation and Xbox are relying on.

With new game prices rising to over £60, it is no wonder this membership platform is appealing to players - especially with the promise of platform exclusives, AAA games and Day One releases. Microsoft realised they had to make a change and the vision was a games rental service: Xbox Game Pass. Back in 2013, Xbox One positioned itself as an entertainment hub rather than a games console - this turned out to be a crucial mistake and one they had to revert due to the backlash from consumers.

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