So, Sony must clearly have well over the 15 million Gamepass Subscribers having launched into open beta long before? 20 million subscribers or so, right? Maybe 30 million?
I mean, if Sony only had 2.2 million or so subscribers for their streaming service, that would be pretty darn embarrassing, given the lead time. Doubly so given Ryan’s original comments dismissing Gamepass.
Or, have Sony botched the messaging and been entirely non-committal on the service, leaving them three years behind were Gamepass is today?
PS Now is a game streaming and downloading service, and Gamepass not. Gamepass is a game download subscription, like Gold and PS Plus. Out of the 3, the biggest one is PS Plus.
The game streaming isn't included in Gamepass, it's included in Gamepass Ultimate. Which as of now doesn't stream to consoles. We don't know how many Gamepass Ultimate subs are out there, and even considering that, we don't know how many of them are real subcribers paying a full subscripition.
The 2.2 million of PS Now are real subscribers who pay a full subscription, not people who paid $1 for 3 years or got some months of free Game Pass with Discord and so on. If you want a huge number of subscribers look at PS+, who has the biggest one.
Sony gets a way bigger revenue from their game subscription services compared to Microsoft. Same goes with selling games, both 1st and 3rd party, and consoles. This means Sony doesn't need to mimic any MS strategy because the current Sony gaming strategy is way more profitable and successful, even if we only compare their game subscriptions in their financial reports.
In any case, it's Microsoft who has to continue copying and learning stuff from Sony. As an example, to stream games to consoles, because MS has 0 subscribers streaming games on console as of now and Sony has beed doing it since 2014.
Sony said last year they had mid term plans to improve PS Now for the next gen, like to upgrade resolution to 1080p and beyond, support more counties, to improve the content quality, tweak pricing, improve servers and more. We saw some of these things already happening since then, so it's fair to think the other ones will also come in the following months.