If I were to estimate total PS4 and PS5 consoles to be a potential playerbase of 160 million and that recent estimates of base PS Plus of 48 million being true… Unless we were to assume the remaining 110 million users don’t have internet; that’s a lot of players with an additional paywall in place for their favorite online game where something like Fortnite, Warzone 2.0, Apex and Overwatch 2 do not; or feature cost of entry to begin with.
Many of the industry’s most popular online games including GTA Online, Rainbow Six, Diablo 4, Destiny, Monster Hunter World, Forza Horizon, Fallout 76, Sea of Thieves, etc… all of these have an additional paywall for base console subscription plans on top of costs associated with buying the content you want to play just as if it were a boxed release (for the most part). And we have seen a never ending variety of approaches to trying to make this work.
We have all these publishers and studios chasing the growing market of live service games. It’s risky and we’ve seen many tragedies as a result from Anthem to Halo Infinite. This paywall is anti-competitive for any developer and publisher who finds a free-to-play launch too risky.
But let’s take the Sony angle here since I think it’s a bit more relevant to current events and of course the audience reading…
Let’s say Microsoft’s acquisition of ABK proceeds as planned. Now not only is Call of Duty at risk of being removed from PlayStation platforms but until then revenues made on PlayStation will go directly to their competitor. That’s fine as Sony is doing the same currently with MLB, Destiny and more to come.
And you would have to assume that somewhere amongst all these new live service efforts from Sony and any other studio working today is the hopes to take a piece of that pie from the F2P giants.
That paywall alone is kneecapping your own studios to keep the biggest publishers happy. We’ve just seen data and documents on how important CoD revenues are to both ABK and Sony. Let’s not forget that Fortnite being exclusive to the PS4 for a fair amount of time as well as it became the biggest game in the world. These relationships served all parties well with big bucks to be made.
So now what?
The easiest thing is to put everything behind base paywall and of course that’ll piss everyone off. So the next best thing is to remove it altogether.
Doing such would tank subscription numbers for both XBL Gold and base PS plus. For Xbox the transition to Gamepass only is effortless as their Gold software offerings are mostly throwaway and a separate subscription. For PlayStation a restructure and price re-evaluation of ps plus tiers would be nice. Base ps plus costs were mandatory for me so the additional $40 spent for extra was great value. But if I don’t need plus I probably won’t sub to Extra.
To put it in plainly… both hardware manufacturers are just fucking their own studios over.
