With last night’s PS5 Showcase event, and certainly in the months since the PlayStation 5 was first unveiled, Sony has maintained that it has the content, and that it believes in generational leaps. Some of those promises were broken, of course, when it became clear that so many of the games we presumed were only possible on PS5, are also coming to PS4. Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Sackboy, and even the undated Horizon Forbidden West will all be available on Sony’s current-gen console when they release. But one thing that hasn’t changed yet is Sony’s attitude towards Xbox Game Pass and other subscription services that bundle AAA games, on day one, for one small asking price. “We have had this conversation before - we are not going to go down the road of putting new releases titles into a subscription model,” PlayStation boss Jim Ryan told Games Industry. “These games cost many millions of dollars, well over $100 million, to develop. We just don’t see that as sustainable.”
Ryan added that the types of games Worldwide Studios teams make today, and the games they will be making in the future, wouldn’t make sense as part of Game Pass-style subscription. “We want to make the games bigger and better, and hopefully at some stage more persistent,” he explained. “So putting those into a subscription model on day one, for us, just doesn’t make any sense. For others in a different situation, it might well make sense, but for us it doesn’t. “We want to expand and grow our existing ecosystem, and putting new games into a subscription model just doesn’t sit with that.” Ryan has, of course, made no secret in the past of his feelings towards having a Game Pass-style program on PlayStation. He famously said that Sony wants to treat its first-party games as big events, and putting them on PlayStation Now or any other service on day one wouldn’t be the right way to treat them.
