Why Sony Isn’t Putting ‘God of War’ and Other New Exclusives on PlayStation Plus

Earlier in 2022, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) heavily restructured its PlayStation Plus subscription service by dividing it into three tiers, the highest one taking over what used to be PlayStation Now, a separate cloud gaming service with poor membership. 

The result was a more bountiful subscription service that closely resembled competitor Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass offering.  

But if you were hoping you’d be able to avoid paying full price for new exclusives like “God of War: Ragnarök,” then you won’t be surprised that the improved PS Plus isn’t paying off.

After rolling out the new PS Plus in June, SIE saw continued subscriber decline to the tune of nearly 2 million in the quarter ended September 30. PS Plus has been losing subscribers at a slow rate since reaching its all-time high of 48 million subscribers in the last holiday quarter, so this marks a significantly more pronounced drop in subs since then. 

It’s difficult to derive exact comparisons between PS Plus and Game Pass, as Microsoft does not regularly release exact subscriber numbers and neither company breaks down subscribers by specific tiers. This means there’s no real sense of how many PS Plus subs are simply those whose plans in June were automatically switched to Essential, the lowest tier that enables online gameplay and a couple free downloads each month, vs. preexisting subs who paid more to upgrade to the Extra and Premium tiers to access those game libraries. 

Per its own filings, Microsoft failed to meet a 73% Game Pass subscriber target for its latest fiscal year, instead growing subs by 28%, but that’s not an outright decline like what SIE has seen in the infancy of its revamped offering. 

The difference here comes down to strategy. 

Game Pass growth might be stalling, but Xbox has still pledged to offer day-one releases of its new console exclusives for subscribers, meaning growth is likely to improve when key titles like “Starfield” release in 2023. By contrast, SIE doesn't put its highly anticipated exclusives on PS Plus when they become available to purchase, meaning the “God of War” sequel can only be bought at full price when it releases Nov. 9. 

This may seem like an oversight, given the ongoing struggle to maintain PS Plus subscribers, but creating too much value in its service could reduce the effectiveness of other investments SIE has been making to address other problems. 

SIE may finally have bounced back from the PS5 sales slowdown that stemmed from the global semiconductor chip shortage, resulting in the failure to meet its fiscal 2021 target. 

The latest quarter saw SIE sell 3.3 million PS5 consoles. While not a year-over-year decline, it’s not exactly much of an improvement towards meeting Sony’s new fiscal-year target. Still, Sony invested in a new manufacturing plant for semiconductor chips as a means of ensuring it can better withstand further chip shortages. 

More consoles sold means more exclusive titles can be purchased on those consoles, so a PS Plus that is an exact replica of Game Pass could hurt individual sales of its popular titles and put more pressure on Sony’s investment in chip production to do the heavy lifting of extra console sales. 

Likewise, Sony was already releasing catalog titles to the PC market before it revamped its subscription offering. 2018’s “God of War” became available for PC gamers in January 2022, causing cumulative sales of the game to jump from 19.5 million in August 2021 to 23 million as of the latest earnings report—an impressive increase of unit sales for a four-year-old title. Similarly, the release of “Marvel’s Spider-Man" on PC this year has generated significant results. 

Sony is also midway through a strategic shift toward offering more live-service games in order to achieve a foundation of steady income from in-game purchases. This is the predominant model for major game publishers these days, and SIE logged a 247% increase in add-on sales on PS5 primarily from third-party titles from November 2020 through March 2022, when compared with the equivalent period after the PS4’s launch. SIE projects it will have 12 live services available to consumers by fiscal-year 2025 and already spent billions to acquire Bungie, the company behind the popular “Destiny” series.

Just look at how much of a difference “Call of Duty: Warzone” made for the Activision segment at Activision Blizzard upon its free-to-play March 2020 release. Increased in-game spending has enabled Activision to rake in more revenue for each non-holiday quarter than what it was earning before, taking pressure off mainline “Call of Duty” titles to deliver most of the year’s revenue every fourth quarter. 

Sony has yet to know which of its live services in development will resonate with players enough to generate enough extra income to weather the gaps between major releases, meaning a pivot toward making new exclusives available to PS Plus subscribers could cause them to jump the gun and undo significant gains in revenue that are just around the corner. 

However, there is still a big unknown in what happens to the PlayStation-Xbox competition if Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard successfully goes through.  

The day before “God of War: Ragnarök” releases is the deadline for EU antitrust regulators to decide whether they will approve or oppose the deal that will enable Microsoft and Xbox to control the future of “Call of Duty.” The franchise has often yielded the bestselling title every year on PlayStation and just saw its own record launch for a new entry with October’s “Modern Warfare II,” which brought in $800 million over its first three days. 

Ownership of “Call of Duty” has been the primary complaint expressed by Sony to global regulatory bodies regarding Activision’s impending acquisition, as this could throw a wrench into the various investments the company has been made to strengthen SIE in other areas, including its acceptance that PS Plus had to change. 

Now that PS Plus subscribers can get many more games en masse, the last thing SIE wants is to make another shift in subscription strategy when it’s still waiting for everything else to come to fruition.