PlayStation VP reflects on 15 years of PS Plus

It’s a big month for PlayStation Plus.

On June 29, Sony will be celebrating 15 years of its gaming subscription service. What started off primarily as a requirement for online multiplayer has evolved into offering free games every month and, in 2022, two additional tiers featuring hundreds of additional titles, including retro classics, cloud streaming and full-game trials.

To commemorate the big PS Plus anniversary, MobileSyrup sat down with Nick Maguire, vice president of global services at PlayStation, for a wide-ranging conversation about the service. Maguire spoke about the evolution of PS Plus, how PlayStation decides which games to court for day one launches on the service, the potential for classic games to be offered outside of the PS Plus catalogue and more.

Congrats on 15 years of PS Plus. I didn’t even realize it had been that long until I was preparing for this interview. Looking back on that time, what are you most proud of having accomplished with the service?

Nick Maguire: Yeah. I’ve been with PlayStation seven-and-a-half years, so almost exactly half of that time. But yeah, it has gone quickly, even in the last seven-and-a-half years. We’ve really gone from strength to strength to strength in terms of bringing great games to people. You have to look at the change in the service in 2022 when we introduced new tiers as a key moment when we really added more value and breadth of benefits that we didn’t have before. And that catalogue is where I’m particularly proud  — it has proved really popular with players and subscribers. You probably saw that we announced last week that we’ve reached 38 per cent of our base opt-in for those top two tiers, which we’re really happy with.

Just the engagement we’re seeing there — we’ve just gone past two billion hours in the last year of gameplay across that catalogue. And I think the evolution from starting up with the Instant Game Collection, and we have delivered about 500 games through the Instant Game Collection in the last 15 years, and evolving back into that catalogue, where you can give people such a breadth of experiences and games they may not have found before. That’s why we’re really, really, really proud and excited to see players respond to that and feel excited about that. And we’ve got some great stuff to announce for the summer.

Something that I think was really interesting, I was reading an interview that you’d done a year after the launch of Extra and Premium with GamesIndustry.biz, and at the time, you mentioned that you were surprised that Premium had ended up being a bigger share than Extra. Now that we’re two years removed from that, and those two tiers have been around longer, is there anything else that has stood out to you or surprised you in terms of consumer behaviour with PlayStation Plus?

Maguire: I will give you another one: Premium has surprised me again. Premium’s grown 18 per cent in the last year, so I think we’ve really got some momentum in that tier. That still continues to surprise me. I think that the sentiment from the 30th anniversary of PlayStation at the end of last year and into this year is that those sorts of things are really core — that the Premium tier is giving people a lot of reasons for nostalgia to get into Classics. Adding PS5 streaming in the last 12 months has proved popular. Seventy-five per cent of the Premium customers that are eligible have tried streaming out at some point. And bringing the [streaming] beta onto [PlayStation] Portal in the last few months as well. Those things [are] just adding that value proposition, and building out in Premium has continued to surprise me, and the growth has been great.

PS Plus subscriber breakdown. (Image credit: PlayStation)

I’m always surprised about the games we put into the service, how well they do, even if they are one or two years old, day and date, or five or six years old. The response is always really encouraging. We see great results, no matter how old the game is: those games just stand for themselves. And we’ve consistently got four or five first-party games in our top 10: Ghost of Tsushima, [God of War] Ragnarök, [Marvel’s Spider-Man:] Miles Morales, The Last of Us Part I — they’re all in that top 10. They always do really well. We love seeing the breadth of titles in that top 10, top 20. So that’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, GTA V, Hogwarts Legacy now in there as well. So there’s real breadth across those titles that we’re always really, really happy to see.

I remember reading as well in that same interview, you mentioned that it was interesting that, in terms of the global demographics of PS Plus users, there were quite a few similarities in terms of the titles that people were playing. There was a lot more parity between that [than you might think]. I’m curious, being in Canada. You have all these sorts of global insights and data — is there anything that stands out with the Canadian market when it comes to PlayStation Plus subscribers?

Maguire: You know what, you’d be surprised at how consistent country to country they really are. The only exception really is Japan, where you’ve got games like Monster Hunter, Dragon Quest that obviously do really well and maybe don’t feature in top five or 10 elsewhere. You would be surprised how consistent the top 10, top 20 games are in nearly every other country. You wouldn’t be able to tell apart market to market if you sort of saw them anonymized. So no, it’s always surprising how consistent we are market to market with Japan being the only real exception.

That’s definitely fair. You mentioned with the 30th anniversary especially that people are more and more getting into the Classic games, which obviously is a cool thing to celebrate the lineage of PlayStation, and that’s one of the main selling points of Premium. I know in previous generations for PlayStation, you could just go onto the PlayStation Store and buy all those retro games à la carte. Is there a possibility that you might return to that model, or are Classic games at the moment just targeted as a PlayStation Plus Premium exclusive offering?

Resident Evil: Director’s Cut on PS1 is one of the PS Classics available through Premium. (Image credit: Capcom)

Maguire: Yeah, no plans and nothing to share on a changing strategy there from where we are today.

Something else that is really notable about PlayStation Plus is sometimes you’ll include high-profile third-party games on day one. Stray was a popular example of that a couple years ago, and even [this month], you have Remedy’s new multiplayer game, FBC: Firebreak. I’m curious, what are the sorts of things that you look for in a game that make you want to court it — to make a deal with the company and make it a PlayStation Plus day one release?

Maguire: Our strategy has always been to look for breadth of content. We’re not going to go all in on any one genre or day-and-date games versus games that are a couple of years old. Our strategy has always been, “Let’s find 3, 4, 5, 6 day-and-date games that really have strong appeal, we think it’s going to have really good critical acclaim, and people are going to want to pick up and play it.” So we’ll work with our teams internally — we’ve got a great team that’s working with publishers, developers, studios, to understand what those opportunities are. We will try to find a Dave the Diver or a Stray — three, four or five of those a year — and then it’s really breadth. So how can we find the game that’s maybe a couple years old that someone’s not played before, or a game they’re expecting because it’s AAA that they might be waiting to play it in the catalogue? And then how do we get breadth of genre and the sort of a variety that people are looking for?

And then you’ve got of games in there. So we’re trying to improve the experiences so that people can find those games. So we’ve now got something like 80 different categories of games across the service, and we’re using personalized experiences to make recommendations to people. So we recommend a day-and-date game or a game that’s five years old to the right people, so they can hopefully find something that they’re going to enjoy and spend time playing.

You mentioned it a little bit earlier that you’ve been introducing more cloud functionality into PS Plus, including streaming with console and Portal. How important is cloud technology to the future of PS Plus?

Stray. (Image credit: Annapurna Interactive)

Maguire: It’s really just giving people the option at the moment, and we just want to see what players do with it. As I said before, 75 percent of those eligible have tried it. I think they’ve streamed something like 7000 games across the catalogue, monthly games, trials and things they purchased themselves from the store. So it’s really just having the option for them to use it. And customers are choosing to stream some games, but they want downloads as well. And then we’ll keep an eye on that usage and the behaviours, and we’ll sort of try to make sure we’re adding choice and value in future where they’re looking for that. So we’re happy that it’s there and we’re looking to see how people use it over time.

When you look at the 15 years of PlayStation Plus, we’re in a different landscape in the sense that there are so many more streaming services now, not only within games, but outside of them. Everyone’s vying for your time and money. As you go forward, and that market is increasingly more competitive, what are some of the things that you’re hoping to do to continue to improve value for the service and make sure that people are coming to PlayStation and subscribing to PlayStation Plus?

Maguire: Yeah. The most popular aspect of the service remains the catalogue. So our first priority every year is to make sure we’ve got the right content lineup, content strategy that’s going to appeal to customers. And that’s why we’re trying to put in the best games we can at the best time of the year that’s going to have appeal. And you can see that through the great first-party and third-party games we’ve had in there over time. But the service has evolved so much in the last three to four years, and I think now that we’ve got the three tiers and the way the service is lined up, we’re much more able to respond at bringing new features and benefits at the right time in future as well.

So we’re always looking out to our consumer base and the market to sort of see how we can add value in the future. And you can see that through adding streaming to the Portal. We’ve now got an increasing number of Portal devices out there, a high number with Plus and Plus Premium. So that’s another way we can add value to customers in that streaming beta we’ve got at the moment. And we’ll look in future to see where we can add more value in different ways that the consumers are going to have fun spending time with.

For the Canadian market, a couple months ago there was a price increase for PlayStation Plus. That was the second one that we had since 2023. Of course, everything is going to go up — that’s just the nature of the business. But there were a lot of people who were a little taken aback by that [in Canada, specifically]. Is there a concern that you’re maybe going to be pricing people out of PlayStation Plus? How do you measure the consistency of doing those price increases versus adding new features and content to the service?

God of War Ragnarök is consistently one of the most popular PS Plus titles. (Image credit: PlayStation)

Maguire: Yeah, we want to get the balance right. We want to invest in the service. We want to invest in a proposition. We want to grow the value to people involved, the value for people. I haven’t got any further information on pricing, but we need to get that [right]. We want to make sure we can continue to invest and grow in the future. And I think you can see that from what we announced last week. As I said, 38 per cent are taking those top two tiers — that demand is still there. People are still spending more and more hours using their Plus subscription than they were one year ago, three years ago, five years ago. The engagement is really growing. So we’ll continue to listen to what people want and how they want to use the service and what they think we could do better, and we’ll try to meet those needs when we can to help in the future.

Looking back on those 15 years of PlayStation Plus, especially in the last couple years when you made all those big changes with the new tiers… What would you say the overall impact has been of PlayStation Plus in terms of the larger industry and gamers’ behaviour?

Maguire: I think it’s created a community of people that are playing together and sharing games and experiences. So I think that that has been great to be part of that and to really grow a community of gamers together. I think it’s been great to reach players with games and franchises they wouldn’t have found otherwise — they wouldn’t have played otherwise. And that’s true even before the catalogue with games like Fall Guys and Rocket League, to name two. There’s always been opportunity for us to reach a wider base with games they maybe wouldn’t have found in the store or wouldn’t have thought about buying themselves. I think for developers, publishers, and studios, that’s where Plus has been powerful and can be really helpful to them; it’s a great chance to introduce new audiences to a franchise or a game that’s a couple of years old or just diversify the gameplay across the board.

And it brings people back every month. They know new games are launching. They know there’s a new monthly game. They know there’s new games in the catalogue. And it keeps people engaged and keeps them in that community, and keeps them coming back on the platform. So I think that’s where it’s made a big impact that. As I said before, the top 500 games being offered through monthly games over the last 15 years, and evolving that into the catalogue. That’s what we’ve really tried to double down on — that ability to reach new audiences and help them discover new games.

Where do you see PlayStation Plus in the next 5, 10, 15 years as you hit new milestones and anniversaries?

Maguire: I’m not going to speculate on where the industry might go or what’s going to happen there. But as I said, the way the service is set up now means we can build and evolve the offering much more readily than we could in the past. So I think we will try to stay on the front foot with evolving behaviours, gameplay, things that people want to see, benefits they want to see in the service… And we’ll just try to make sure that Plus is continuing to add more value to more users in future. So we’re not looking to stand still. We’re feeling very happy about where we are, and it’s great to look back and celebrate the last 15 years, the last five years, but I think we’ll continue to look and lean in and listen to our players and subscribers and try to evolve further and bring in more value to them in the future, whatever the wider industry looks like.

This interview has been edited for language and clarity. 

PlayStation Plus Essential starts at $13.99/month, Extra starts at $20.99/month and Premium starts at $24.99/month. More information on all subscription tiers is available on PlayStation’s website.

As part of its 15th anniversary celebrations, PlayStation also revealed July’s new PS Plus games, including Diablo IV, and other initiatives.

Header image credit: PlayStation