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EpicRandy on 12 July 2023
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LurkerJ said:
yvanjean said:


This deal will also force Sony to offer more consumer friendly services and maybe add more day 1 titles on their own subscription services. 

I don't understand this narrative, really. To me, SONY offers the best subscription service for the best price, that is PSN Essential, great monthly games that I get to keep, they also do not rotating in and out. 

I play mainly on the Switch, my PS5 is my secondary machine, I have accumulated a library of over 400 games paying the bare minimum for PSN Plus essential, this includes all sorts of AAA titles, including FF7r, FF15, GoW reboot, Horizon, the list is literally endless. On the other hand, MS deliberately killed off its most basic tier in an attempt to push more gamers to higher priced subscriptions. If I had both options available to me on the PS5, I would still go for PSN Essential. I don't go through games like underwear like some of you do here, which is why I don't like the rotating in and out aspect, I get to play games at my own pace. To me, it seems like MS needs step up its game and be more consumer friendly to those who don't want to pay for higher tier subscriptions. 

If Sony added a day-one release to their subs for a similar pricing strategy as Game Pass, it would be a clear prosumer improvement in their value proposition and I'd subscribe to it, absolutely no question about it.

Same thing if Sony started to support PC adequately. That's where I play most of the time and it would be so nice to play Sony titles more frequently on there.  that would be another undeniable prosumer move.

The thing is Sony benefits from a long-time unchallenged dominant position and it shows to some extent, they have a way higher profit margin than Xbox has. And it all boils down to this, profit margin, if a company succeed in getting a higher profit margin then that means they are able to extract more from the same offering or extract the same amount from a lesser offering (in term of production cost), or both. In a place where competition is extremely healthy the ability for a company to do so is lessened and maybe even close to non-existent, and consumers win. In a place where one actor benefits from a dominant position, they can increase profit margin and consumers lose.

Both decisions to not support PC consistently or subs with day one title have not been taken for the sake of their consumer but for the sake of their own benefits because they can. Xbox started supporting both, again not for consumer sake, but because, in their case, they could not do otherwise as they found themselves in a position where they could not compete effectively with "traditional" console-focused methods and pricing strategy and so were forced to react or quit.