Shuhei Yoshida, the man who leads PlayStation Indies, has reiterated the company’s stance on releasing first-party games to PS Plus as early as day-one, something its competition like Microsoft already does. As expected, this is just a reiteration, nothing has changed as Sony still believes in the “premium release first.”
The news comes from an event at GI Live. Yoshida likened its model to new movies, which typically head to cinema first before making its way to other means viewing like pay-per-view or streaming services. It should be noted that Sony wasn’t wholly against the idea of new games releasing day-and-date on higher tiers of PlayStation Plus.
The gorgeously budget-friendly triple-A console exclusive, Stray, launched on the higher tiers of PS Plus, and this was taken as an example of how it could work. On the other hand, we had Oddworld: Soulstorm, which its developer grew sour of its free status back in April 2021. Soulstorm creator, Lorne Lanning, expected only around 50 to 100K downloads, but what happened was a whopping four million.
In the end, we don’t think we’ll ever see actual triple-A games from PlayStation make it to PS Plus’ higher tiers day-and-date of its release.