Gabriel Stanford-ReisingerPlayStation boss Jim Ryan is purposing that the new PlayStation Plus tiers have garnered an “extremely positive” initial market reactions, despite the technical issues that plagued the public over in Asia (except Japan), where the service first released, according to VGC.
Launched earlier this week, the new service is poised to release in Japan and the other parts of the world here shortly. When it first launched, however, users hit a road block, those who sought to partially game the system by snagging PS Plus memberships at a discount were being forced to pay a higher fee to upgrade to other tiers, but that wasn’t what Sony was claiming before the rollout.
After the backlash peaked, Sony came forward and blamed a “technical error” and users who had this happen to them were given a credit. It’s pretty clear that Ryan wasn’t looking at the actual reactions from users, but rather the membership figures.
Full PlayStation Plus Statement:
“We’re very proud of the work that we’ve done on this service and it’s only two days [old] so it’s far too early, but the very initial market reaction is extremely positive I think if we execute well as we implement this service, beyond Asia to Japan and then to the US and then to Europe, the possibility for us to significantly grow our subscriber base is really real, particularly as sales of PS5 consoles start to accelerate extremely rapidly.”
“The other vector of this of course is that the new service allows us to optimise not only the number of subscribers but to offer the possibility for subscribers to join our second tier of our third tier and access a range of really attractive features and gaming propositions. And if we do that, if we are successful in that, not only will the number of subscribers grow, but the ARPU (average revenue per unit), the ARPU of the subscriber will also correspondingly increase, so there are opportunities along both vectors, the number of subscribers and the ARPU of each of those subscribers.”