Sony recently surprised fans when it revealed that PS Plus Premium has more subscribers than PS Plus Extra. Head of subscriptions Nick Maguire has now revealed that Sony itself was surprised by the data because the company assumed Extra would be the go-to tier for most players.
Sony “pleasantly surprised” by PS Plus Premium popularity over Extra
Speaking to Games Industry, Maguire said that the service’s revamp delivered a few surprises, the biggest one of which was the most expensive tier garnering more subscribers than Extra. For fans, this comes as a bigger surprise due to complaints that Sony has been slow in adding classics to the Premium catalog, and PS3 game streaming remains off-limits in quite a few countries.
“We all thought that Extra would be where the majority of people went to first, but actually Premium has been more popular and bigger,” Maguire said. “That’s a pleasant surprise.”
Maguire reveals that Sony was also surprised by how similar subscribers’ gaming tastes are regardless of region and country. There are exceptions, of course. North American gamers prefer Madden NFL titles and European gamers opt for FIFA games, for example. However, “by and large” the top 20 PS Plus games are “generally the same between countries.”
The third surprise, according to Maguire, is that more players jumped into the revamped PS Plus than Sony thought, and they spent more hours playing games from the catalogs than the company expected.
