PS Plus has declining subscription numbers for the second time, but the new subscription model should fix it

PS Plus subscription numbers have fallen for the second time in the service’s history.

PS Plus should be a pretty lucrative service for Sony in general. After all, the number of subscriptions has grown steadily every quarter since it was introduced 12 years ago – at least until 2021. There were declining subscription numbers here for the first time and this is probably not a single outlier, because the numbers have now fallen for the second time in a row.

PS Plus numbers are falling, but Sony isn’t worried

In a new one quarterly report Sony lists the numbers for PS Plus, among other things. According to this, the subscription service recorded a total of 47.4 million subscriptions for the fourth quarter of 2021 (ending on March 31, 2022). Compared to Q4 2020, the numbers have fallen slightly, where they were still 47.6 million subscribers.

While not a worryingly large drop, this is the second time the numbers have come down. They last fell to 46.3 million in Q1 2021, but then rose again. The numbers of active users of the PlayStation Network also show these fluctuations, here there were 106 million people in Q4 2021 (compared to 109 million in Q4 2022.)

As Sony’s Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki now explains in a call (via VGC), but the fluctuating numbers in 2021 are also due to the fact that demand was particularly high in 2020, as many people were at home due to the pandemic. Nevertheless, he sees this as a positive development:

New PS Plus to boost numbers again

So Sony is not worried, after all, the subscription service remains stable, even with slight fluctuations. In the third quarter of 2021, it had even reached a peak of 48 million users. And Sony is also promising a lot from the revised PS Plus subscription, after all PS Plus and PS Now users are to be brought together here. According to Totoki, the service is set to grow steadily and we should have “high expectations” of the new PS Plus.

All information about the new subscription model that will go live in Germany in June can be found here. If you want to know what happens to your existing membership and how to upgrade, you can read about it here:

The game library of the new service in particular could bring more stable figures again, after all, subscribers will then be less dependent on the monthly offer of free games than before. The coming months will probably show whether this assumption is true.

Do you have a theory about the falling numbers?