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.
Total PS+ subscribers was 46.3 million during the quarter, up from 45m at the same point last year, but down from 47.6m in the prior quarter.
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) August 4, 2021
Q1 usually sees a dip, which was more pronounced this year due to pandemic boost last year.
But this was offset by PS Now growth. pic.twitter.com/U53BPjJ0hu
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.
