Sony Defends Higher Price of PlayStation Plus: 'We Want to Make PlayStation Plus Great'
Vice President of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Eric Lempel, said that the recent increase in the price of PS Plus will help raise the quality of the service. The corporate representative also referred to the Xbox Game Pass offer.
In September, Sony announced significant - as much as approx. 30 percent - price increases for all PlayStation Plus subscription levels. At the time, the corporation did not go into the details of its decision, but after a wave of critical comments, SIE's senior vice president and head of global marketing, Eric Lempel, decided to address the issue.
In an interview with the editors of Barron's (via Resetera), a representative of the Japanese corporation explains that the increase is motivated by the desire to provide users with "great" PlayStation Plus. Here's what he said:
"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.
Like practically everything else in the world, we have to look at our pricing and we have to adjust to market conditions."
In doing so, Lempel aimed a jab at the competition, stressing that the corporation "hasn't changed the prices of its subscriptions in 85% of the markets for many years," unlike "other subscription services.".
"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," he added.
Lempel was also asked what he thought of Xbox Game Pass and its policy of offering first-party titles on launch as part of the subscription. He stated that Sony's service is different from the one developed by Microsoft. He added that SIE focuses primarily on the quality of the games offered and the features that customers have appreciated.
"It comes down to what you're going to get in the service in terms of the type of game and the quality of games. I can't comment on what the competition is doing. But with us, we feel we're offering a great curated catalog of games, as well as other features and services with PlayStation Plus. [...] It's a very different offering, but it's one that resonated with consumers. Since we introduced the tiers, we've seen a third of the Plus user base opt for the upper two tiers, which was more than we had expected," he explained.
It's worth mentioning that Lempel also referred to sales forecasts for the coming months, saying that Sony is "expecting one of the strongest Christmas periods in the company's history in terms of console sales."
