Recently PushSquare released an article stating that the biggest market share in gaming subscription services ( not counting things such as Xbox Live and PlayStation Plus) inexplicably belonged to PlayStation Now. You can see even more on that from the people that did the research at SuperData. But how can this be accurate? I have used the service, and it isn’t great. Playstation Now is a solid but flawed and overpriced service against a reasonable and useful Gamepass from Microsoft, tho admittedly it PSnow has more games. So how did this happen? Well, let us try to figure this out.
First, there are a couple things we need to get out of the way. In pure sales alone, not accounting for anything else, there is no console war between Sony and Microsoft because Sony has won this generation. This report is a little dated but as you can see here. We can estimate that Xbox has sold around 30 million units while Sony has sold around 70 million. Obviously, both of those numbers have since gone up but seeing as how Sony has over 2-1 on consoles sales we can see that that gap hasn’t closed significantly.
What this means is Sony has a huge advantage in potential customer base for their subscription market. Now this has recently gone up with Microsoft launching Gamepass on PC so this gap will close as time goes on, but for now, the gap exists.(Sony also has theirs available on PC. The price point also matters as market share is determined as a percentage of total sales in an industry. For example, if you were selling candy bars and your class sold 100 bars for $1 and you sold 1 of those candy bars your market share would be 1%.
Gamepass is (rounding up) $10 and Psnow is (again rounding up) $20 you can see Sony only needs to sell 1 to get the same share as 2 of Microsoft. With what can only be described as a huge advantage in potential customers and twice the price point while it seems highly unlikely, this is how Sony has managed to have a higher market share in streaming service. They simply have a larger customer base and price point. This is also why Sony does very little to improve much of what they have, they are making money at an amazing rate and have no reason in their minds to change. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
Savior Gaming 