The new PlayStation Plus may not be working out as well as Sony might have hoped, according to new financial documents from the company that can confirm a significant loss of subscribers following the introduction of the revamped service, which debuted in June. PlayStation Plus saw 47.3 million accounts at the end of that month, but that number fell to 45.4 million in the three months leading up to September 30, a decrease of 4 percent. The decline is said to stem from PS4 users.
From a Sony Q2 FY2022 report:
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.
Discussion (7 replies)
Join Discussion →Considering dropping mine when it expires as well.
The only reasons I hadn't:
I used to buy a year at a time - you could find it on sale occasionally, so I still have the sub until December.
and
You lose access to all the "free" games you had accrued - you don't get those back when you re-up. Most of them are junk, but a few decent ones. Not sure it's worth the cost of the sub just to keep those around though.
Wait, what? Huh, guess its good it got auto renewed because I forgot to turn that off. I've got until next summer to play a few of those games then that I haven't gotten around to. Though, most of them I've gotten over several years I don't care about.
You can still find the PS+ "essentials" subs for under $40 now and then. But if you want "Extra" or higher, you're gonna pay.
For me, I had over 400 days of PS+ "essentials" (due to code stacking), and I upgraded to "Extra" for the entire duration and it was like $40... for over a year.
I always turn off auto-renew bc they charge you full retail price which is quite a bit more $. Same with every subscription service (AV, Sam's/Costco, TV services, etc)
And yeah... PS+ games "expire" if your sub expires. But if you renew they become available again.
Check out slickdeals.net and set up an alert for PS+ for the code deals. You can't always find them on demand to so better to get alerted and stack up.
Oh, so they didn't change it? I knew that if you dropped your sub to PS+ you lost access to the free monthly games but you would get access again if you re subscribed.
Not sure — I had dropped between PS3 and PS4 and nothing I had came back. You don’t get a free copy of the game — you get access to the game so long as your subscription is contiguous is how I understood it to work. But that’s been a few years.
I have a feeling I’m about to find out again soon; the Sony site isn’t clear about it — but most people “around the web” seem to say what you are saying : you get access restored when you resubscribe.
As for the monthly releases..... The games have to be in your library. This is why I always add the games to my library soon after the monthly drops, but I don't install them... even if I think I won't play a game. Because if you change your mind down the road, you can't go back and claim it.
PS3 to 4 is a little different... if you had claimed PS3 games, then PS+ expired. Then if you got a PS4... you won't have the same games in your library bc they are PS3 games? I don't know if you have the option to re-sub then pick the newer versions of the old games.... hmmm. I do know when I had my Vita the PS3 games I had claimed were mostly available in Vita version... but I never expired. I know PS4 to PS5 isn't a big deal since it can play the PS4 versions.
I still had my PS3 at the time, so that wasn't it. That said, Xbox Game Pass also came into existence somewhere in that time period, so Sony may have changed their language to be more competitive, or I've had too many beers and just misremembering.