Welcome back to Pushing Buttons, folks – and having begun last week's issue by saying that there was nothing much happening in the video game world, I now find myself with a lot to talk about.
It is now becoming a running joke that massive games-industry news keeps dropping in the hours after this newsletter gets sent out on a Tuesday. A few months back it was Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard; then the New York Times bought Wordle. Last week it was Sony's rumoured revamp of the PlayStation Plus subscription service, and then the not entirely unexpected news that E3 – the annual games industry showcase in LA – has been completely cancelled, having previously shifted to a digital-only event.
I am not going to spend long mourning the loss of E3, whose relevance to anyone other than games industry marketers, developers and journalists has long been waning. I hope it returns next year; if it doesn't, I will miss the annual gathering in LA, and the buzz of covering live news and interviewing people as it happens. You don't get to do that much on my beat. Like much of the entertainment industry, games news tends to be very tightly scheduled and controlled by publishers and marketers, so you are very rarely in a situation where you're having to report reactively on the ground. But where else could you be playing some random VR horror game financed by Elijah Wood, freak out and take off the headset, only to discover you were being watched by Hideo Kojima and his entourage?
Sony's revamp of PlayStation Plus, however, is something that has implications for all of us. For many years now, if you paid your £40 a year to play games online on a PlayStation 4 or 5, you'd get a couple of free games every month. It's been a popular and generous offer for players, and the free games were often a mix of expensive hits like Uncharted and great indie games that people might not otherwise have played. Now, PlayStation Plus is becoming something a bit more like Microsoft's Netflix-of-games Game Pass subscription: for £83.99 a year, you get access to a vast catalogue of about 400 games, dating back to the original PlayStation and running right up to last year's PlayStation 5 sci-fi masterpiece Returnal. For £100 a year, you can stream them all rather than downloading them.
There's one big difference here from Xbox's Game Pass: Microsoft offers every single new game it launches as part of that subscription, for £10.99 a month – from Forza Horizon to the forthcoming Bethesda role-playing epic Starfield. Sony will continue to launch new games as standalone purchases, for £60 to £70. And presumably it will be a while before those games find their way into the Plus catalogue. This is a bit like movies screening in cinemas and coming out on Blu-ray first before appearing on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Explaining that decision, Sony's Jim Ryan said, "The level of investment that we need to make in our studios would not be possible [if we included every new game in the subscription], and we think the knock-on effect on the quality of the games that we make would not be something that gamers want."
This speaks to something significant about Microsoft's approach: one strongly suspects that Game Pass is loss-making, at least for now. That company has impossibly deep pockets; it just spent $70bn on an embattled publisher, after all. Sony and Nintendo cannot compete on those terms. Offering all its new games as part of a subscription would destroy Sony's profitability – which should come as no surprise, when we see how streaming services have already affected the music, TV and film industries. For now, PlayStation Plus is supplementing – rather than replacing – game sales.
If you have a PlayStation and you're not fussed about playing the latest games as soon as they come out, it looks like you could save significant money by paying for a Plus subscription instead of three or four full-price new games a year. That's if your bank account can sustain yet another direct debit: between Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, Nintendo Switch Online, Spotify, Netflix, Disney+, Apple Music and whatever other entertainment subscriptions you're paying for, it's terrifyingly easy to be spending upwards of £50 a month on this stuff.
This is one reason I'm not immensely keen on the idea of an all-streaming future. In that scenario, either one company wins out, eats all the other ones and we're left with one subscription … or we've all got so many subscriptions going, it's an unsustainable drain on our finances. Neither of those looks like the path to a healthy video-games industry to me.