As A Fan Of PlayStation, I’m Disappointed With Their Approach To Game Pass

Sony just recent­ly announced they would invest­ing $1 bil­lion more dol­lars into Epic Games, in order to help them cre­ate a meta­verse aimed at chil­dren. While this is all well and good, I have one major issue with this–this mon­ey was­n’t divert­ed to help with the new­ly invent­ed PlaySta­tion Plus.

My only ques­tion is: Why? This deci­sion does­n’t seem to fair well with recent com­ments made by PlaySta­tion boss Jim Ryan, who said the com­pa­ny could­n’t afford to give away their exclu­sives to PlaySta­tion Plus sub­scribers. That the stu­dios who devel­op these titles need the rev­enue from these exclu­sive releas­es, because–it appears–Sony does­n’t want to invest in their own studios.

Instead, they are choos­ing to invest anoth­er bil­lion dol­lars to Epic Games, of which they have already invest­ed $450 mil­lion. Why is Sony decid­ing to do the bare min­i­mum for their con­sumers? It’s just tak­ing away from what could have been an amaz­ing sub­scrip­tion ser­vice for the loy­al fans who have stuck by them despite their failings.

I under­stood the ini­tial rea­son­ing behind Jim Ryan’s excuse, that PlaySta­tion just could­n’t afford to invest that kind of mon­ey into a ser­vice that they don’t even know is going to work out for them. As Sony sim­ply does­n’t have the same finan­cial resources that Microsoft has, in which gives them a lot for free­dom and lee­way to take risks.

But this bil­lion dol­lar deal has put an extreme­ly sour taste in my mouth.

It means Sony has the finan­cial back­ing to take risks, but they con­tin­u­al­ly chose to go against their con­sumers and fans. This is some­thing I just don’t under­stand. We keep you in busi­ness. With­out the play­ers, there would­n’t be a PlaySta­tion divi­sion to Sony’s com­pa­ny. When the play­ers are not hap­py, they will play elsewhere–leaving Sony’s con­sole for the sole pur­pose of play­ing those exclu­sives they cov­et so dearly.

In the end, it’s not my com­pa­ny. How­ev­er, as a fan, it tru­ly shows me where Sony’s pri­or­i­ties are. While, yes, all gam­ing com­pa­nies are try­ing to make prof­it, the anti-con­sumer antics seen from Sony, and Nin­ten­do over the years, are just mind blow­ing. While I lost my respect for these two com­pa­nies years ago, I was hon­est­ly hop­ing that Microsoft­’s hard push toward con­sumer fair­ness would have laid the ground­work for Sony to do some­thing similar.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I had way to much faith in human­i­ty and was sore­ly dis­ap­point­ed. Will I move to an Xbox? No, but I like­ly won’t be pay­ing for a Pre­mi­um mem­ber­ship of PlaySta­tion Plus either.