Essential is basically the same PS Plus offering Sony already had, and it even kept the same $9.99 a month price. Extra and Premium give subscribers a chance to experience additional membership benefits. Like a catalog of downloadable games from current and past generation consoles. And for Premium members, cloud gaming and game demos. For a higher monthly cost, naturally. The plans are definitely intriguing and do have plenty to offer. But it seems Sony’s plan revamp isn’t necessarily killing it. With subscriptions having dropped from 47.3 million at the end of June to 45.4 million by the end of September. Sony suggests that a large portion of these dropped subscriptions may be due to the lack of a PS5.
Sony plans to increase PlayStation Plus subscriber numbers by increasing PS5 sales
According to Sony’s financial report, the majority of subscribers are using a PS5. So it plans to ramp up production of the PS5 and sell more of those consoles. Which it hopes will help it recoup some of the lost subscribers from this past quarter. Sony also reported that its PS5 sales had now reached 25 million units. 5.7 million of which were from the first half of the fiscal year 2023 that ends on March 31 of next year. This is also quite a bit below Sony’s planned goal to sell 18 million PS5 consoles throughout the entirety of the fiscal year 2023. Though Sony hopes to push through high sales numbers during the holidays, the company seems less likely to reach that 18 million target. Since it will have to sell another 12.3 million consoles by the end of March 2023 to hit that number. About 6.6 million more than it has sold so far this fiscal year.