In a recent interview, Jim Ryan, president of Sony Interactive Entertainment, not only responded to the PlayStation 5's backward compatibility, but also expressed his views on subscription-based game content services, believing that game companies should not put the latest game content into subscription services for use.
Jim Ryan believes that many new games are produced at great cost to developers, and some even cost millions of dollars to produce. He believes that it is difficult to recover development costs solely through subscription-based service billing.
However, Jim Ryan did not directly deny that subscription services are not suitable for gaming content. After all, Sony Interactive Entertainment has added a new service called Collections to the PlayStation Plus service, allowing PlayStation Plus service members to directly play popular games on the PlayStation 4 platform in the past. At the same time, it also provides a subscription-based streaming game service called PlayStation Now in the North American market.
However, given the current development of the gaming market, companies including Apple, Ubisoft, and Electronic Arts (EA) all offer their own subscription-based gaming services, while Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Google also offer their own streaming gaming services. Many of these companies have chosen to add their latest releases to their services, or even offer them exclusively on their service platforms. Clearly, it is not impossible to support and recover the costs of developing new games through subscription-based billing.
Therefore, Jim Ryan's statement is obviously in line with Sony Interactive Entertainment's current development strategy in the game market, which means that new games on the PlayStation 5 platform can only be used by purchasing physical discs or paying to download digital content, and will not appear in its subscription-based services.
Regarding the recent sell-out of PlayStation 5 pre-orders, Sony Interactive Entertainment has stated that it will be offering more pre-orders soon. However, Sony Interactive Entertainment has not commented on the allegations of scalpers inflating resale prices.
