Back in August, Sony announced price increases for all tiers of PS Plus. Naturally, the news wasn't especially well received by subscribers, and even now, months later, it's still a touchy subject — especially since you could argue that the overall quality of PS Plus, in terms of game offerings, hasn't improved since the price hike was implemented in September.
But what's Sony's take on the situation? Well, in a new interview with Barron's, PlayStation exec Eric Lempel offers some degree of insight. To its credit, the publication asks Lempel directly about consumer criticism of the aforementioned price increase, to which he responds: "We want to make PlayStation Plus great. With our reboot last year and introducing the tier system, a lot of consumers have recognized that there’s a lot of value in PlayStation 5."
It's a bit of a nothing answer, but Lempel continues: "Like practically everything else in the world, we have to look at our pricing and we have to adjust to market conditions."
Lempel then goes on try and contextualise the decision: "I’m happy to say, unlike a lot of other subscription services out there, we haven’t touched the PlayStation Plus pricing for 85% of the world in many years. So, this was the first time we did something there." Hmmm.
Purely from a business perspective, we can understand why Sony wants to make more money from PS Plus. Recent reports strongly suggest that gaming subscription numbers have almost completely plateaued, with PS Plus itself having been stuck at around 50 million subscribers for years now — and it's a very similar story with Xbox Game Pass.