Sony has divulged its lat­est earn­ings report, which includes pos­i­tive news for PS5 pro­duc­tion and some of the com­pa­ny’s biggest fran­chis­es. One unex­pect­ed shin­ing star for the quar­ter was PlaySta­tion Now, Sony’s sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, which appears to have grown enough to help off­set oth­er mar­ket sources.

As not­ed by Daniel Ahmad on Twit­ter, Sony’s sub­scrip­tion sales under its Game & Net­work ser­vices divi­sion is at its high­est point ever. While the major­i­ty of this num­ber is still attrib­uted to PlaySta­tion Plus, which is slight­ly up year-over-year, but down from the pri­or quar­ter. Ahmad says the dip would have been expect­ed in Q1 because it got a boost last year due to the stay-at-home order across the globe. But PlaySta­tion Now has dri­ven the com­pa­ny’s over­all sub­scrip­tion sales up, to off­set this dip from PS Plus.

A spe­cif­ic rea­son for why PlaySta­tion Now is expe­ri­enc­ing growth was not giv­en, but Sony has been treat­ing the ser­vice to more TLC late­ly. It gets more first-par­ty games and recent­ly upgrad­ed to 1080p stream­ing. It could also be ben­e­fit­ing from play­ers using ser­vices sim­i­lar to it, like Xbox cloud gam­ing, Google Sta­dia, and Ama­zon Luna.

PlaySta­tion Now began as a stream­ing-only ser­vice, but now offers the option of stream­ing or down­load­ing select games. Sony is hes­i­tat­ing to make PlaySta­tion Now a direct com­peti­tor to Xbox’s Game Pass, but the com­pa­ny did tease it will have an answer to Game Pass.

The finan­cial results also showed that the disc ver­sion of the PS5 is no longer being sold at a loss, as the the com­pa­ny has secured enough com­po­nents to reach its PS5 sales target. 

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