When Sony’s premium digital content service, Playstation Plus, first arrived on PSN, it was met with scepticism by current Playstation owners, and snide derision from Xbox fans, who saw the service as a poor attempt to bring Sony’s online store up to speed with Microsoft’s.
Indeed, it was a shaky start for Playstation Plus, with the service offering a pretty paltry early selection of free and discounted games. Other benefits of the service included cloud save data storage, scheduled automatic updates, and free game trials, but it simply failed to capture the imagination.
Now, a couple of years on and Sony are reporting unprecedented satisfaction rates with the service, at it has become a gold mine of free full games, substantial discounts, and early beta access to certain games. According to a Sony spokesperson speaking with Gamesindustry.biz, satisfaction rates currently stand at 97%.
Playstation Plus has grown from an anaemic, low-value gimmick to what Sony now describe as a ‘significant part’ of their marketing efforts and ‘a nice weapon in [their] arsenal.’ John Koller said to GI:
This is a nice weapon in our arsenal that we’ll be utilizing and it’s just a great value for a consumer that’s coming in. If you look at a consumer that’s coming in in year 6 or year 7…you could call them a later adopter and giving them an instant game collection, which is what PlayStation Plus provides, has really proven to be successful. So this is going to be a very important part of what we do here over the next few months. You’ll see it at holiday. You’ll see it even beyond that with various integrations into our ecosystem.
Koller went on to speak about how PS Plus has been integral in making less tech-savvy gamers more comfortable with the idea of going digital, and will continue to push itself as a service which provides people with an ‘instant game collection.’ He added that the service will continue becoming an increasingly integral part of Playstation’s marketing strategy.
