Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO, Jim Ryan, has said that the company’s response to Microsoft’s popular Game Pass will come in due course, but not right away.
In an interview with TASS Russian News Agency, Ryan was specifically asked how Sony will respond to Game Pass, to which he said, “There is actually news to come, but just not today. We have PlayStation Now, which is our subscription service, and that is available in a number of markets.”
Back in September, Ryan said that a subscription model akin to Game Pass isn’t “sustainable,” and suggested that Sony has no plans to go down that route. Speaking to Games Industry, Ryan explained that games are expensive to develop and it doesn’t make sense to offer them as part of subscription services. He added that such a model might work for other companies but it doesn’t align with Sony’s vision.
Ryan said:
For us, having a catalogue of games is not something that defines a platform. Our pitch, as you’ve heard, is ‘new games, great games.’ We have had this conversation before – we are not going to go down the road of putting new releases into a subscription model. These games cost many millions of dollars, well over $100 million, to develop. We just don’t see that as sustainable.
We want to make the games bigger and better, and hopefully at some stage more persistent. So putting those into a subscription model on day one, for us, just doesn’t make any sense. For others in a different situation, it might well make sense, but for us it doesn’t. We want to expand and grow our existing ecosystem, and putting new games into a subscription model just doesn’t sit with that.
In light of the above, it’ll be interesting to see how Sony will respond to Game Pass.
[Source: TASS]
