The two companies have similar views on making their latest games immediately available on a subscription system.

With (Xbox) Game Pass, we’re used to it: all Xbox Game Studios titles are available on the subscription service from day one, and in most cases, you can run those games from the cloud. But Sony is not following this example with PlayStation Plus, which already has three tiers in Asia and Japan. However, it is still the same in the US and Europe because the ‘blues’ say that it doesn’t make much sense from an economic point of view (i.e. they would lose money).

But Sony is not alone in this, as Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two’s CEO, expressed a similar view to Gamesindustry. He is not against subscription services, as Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto III – The Definitive Edition, and the BioShock Remastered trilogy have all been available on PlayStation Now. Zelnick said, “We’ve supported various subscription services, and we’re happy to do so. Our scepticism has been around making frontline console products available day and date with a subscription. And that doesn’t make any sense to us because, economically speaking, we don’t think consumers are prepared to pay for that – why would they? We can’t afford to turn our business upside down in a way that doesn’t make sense economically.

So there always has to be an intersection between what the consumer wants and what the publisher can do. In our opinion, it doesn’t make sense to do that for frontline properties, and I think Sony minimally agrees with us because they’ve said so. It can be potentially significant for catalogue properties. Those are properties that have been in the market for a while. If their price has been reduced, it can make economic sense to offer those on a subscription basis.”

Zelnick concluded that Take-Two does not operate based on one person’s opinion, including him. If gamers are clear that a game should be available as part of a subscription model from launch, the publisher will reconsider its stance. So: if there are more subscribers to Game Pass, they will reconsider…

Source: PSL