Sony has announced that while we are all crammed into our front rooms, it seems we are spending more on video games, and they#ve got the Playstation Plus subscription numbers to prove it.
During a recent corporate strategy meeting, Kenichiro Yoshida, Sony Corp’s President and CEO, dropped the numbers that confirm Sony’s Playstation cloud services are doing some very healthy numbers. Over the last quarter, Sony added 2.7 million subscribers to its Playstation Plus service, bringing the total breadth of the user base to 45.1 million in total as of the end of Q1 2020.
Now Hear This
The Playstation Now cloud streaming service might not be doing the same numbers but the current COVID situation has certainly coincided with a dramatic increase in paid subscribers. The streaming game service launched back in 2014 and was launched after Sony’s acquisition of the Onlive game streaming service. Unlike Playstation Plus, which gives Playstatin owners access to cloud saves, premium online services, and free games for their PS hardware the Now iteration allows gamers on non Sony devices to stream a range of Playstation titles direct to their internet enabled system. The platform has nows added around 1.2 million paid users between October 2019 and the end of April 2020, more than doubling the number of people accessing Sony games on this platform.
What is even more interesting is the increase in remote play, with gamers stuck indoors remote play seems to have increased around 2.5 times, according to this investor update. While there’s a lot more detail in the recent Investor report, including some interesting technical updates on the Playstation 5 console’’s sound system. We’re off to update our Stadia subscription and check out if Horizon Zero Dawn is ever going to come to PC before we crumble and buy that PS Now sub ourselves. If you want to check out the full set of slides from the presentation you can grab them at the Sony site now.
