Sony held a further earnings call today for overseas investors, and dropped a few more interesting tidbits of information on the PlayStation business and in particular on PlayStation Plus via President and CEO Kazuo Hirai and Chief Financial Officer Masaru Kato.
Kato-san mentioned that the PS4 had a “very strong sell-through,” and the company will continue to “chase the market”. The Japanese launch coming this month is expected to increase the numbers further.
He continued by saying that at the moment the PSN has 150 million users, and that number is growing steadily with the introduction of the PS4, while many of those are also subscribing toPlayStation Plus. Since that’s a paid service, it’s a new revenue stream for the company. Kato-san also explained that this kind of service will be one of the major contributing factors to the profitability of the PS4 on the side of hardware and packaged sales.
Since Kato-san was being quite vague with numbers, Hirai-san took the initiative and revealed a more specific estimate for the PS Plus Subscribers brought in by the introduction of the PS4:
I’d like to add a little more color by saying that of the 4.2 million PS4 that have already in the hands of the consumers… More than half of the people that have gotten their hands on a PS4 have actually signed up with a PS Plus service.
That’s a pretty impressive number, and combined with the graph shown by SCEE General Manager Fergal Gara during the press conference introducing the PlayStation Vita Slim to the UK market, we can pretty much conclude that at the moment PlayStation Plus has over 3.15 Million Subscribers.
Hirai-san promised further data in the coming months (most probably he meant the yearly results announcement in May), so we’ll have to wait a bit more to hear more detailed and precise information on the service’s success.
