Monthly round-up: ‘Day one’ Xbox Game Pass releases rise in Q1 2022

From February 2022 to March 2022, 71 games were added to the tracked services (down from 80 last month) and 37 games were removed (down from 84 last month). Magenta Gaming closed on 26 February 2022 and was removed from Ampere’s games subscription service, bringing the total number of games down to 4,733 (from 4,871) in that month. In March 2022, the overall number of titles in Ampere’s tracked games content subscription service rose to 4,761.

These are the main games subscription catalogue changes in March 2022:

• All Xbox Game Pass (XGP) services added 12 titles, drawing for the most content added to the services tracked in March 2022. Ten of the titles brought to XGP were added to all three services, including Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (Square Enix), Tunic (Finji), and Shredders (FoamPunch). The remaining titles were added to select XGP services. Tainted Grail: Conquest (Awaken Realms Digital) was added to XGP Console in March 2022 after being available in PC (and therefore Ultimate) since October 2021. This demonstrates an ongoing trend in XGP which has seen a harmonisation of the PC and console catalogues. This is an efficient content acquisition strategy as Microsoft already possesses the license to the title, making the process of adding it to another tier of the service simpler than acquiring an entirely new title.
• 11 titles were removed from XGP Ultimate (across XGP Console and PC, and EA Play) the most across the services tracked. Two of the titles removed were published by Square Enix, one of which, Kingdom Hearts III, was removed after a prolonged stay of around a year and a half. The title was removed the month before the 20^th anniversary of the Kingdom Hearts series, which saw the announcement of Kingdom Hearts IV, a new mainline game. This will inevitably renew interest in the franchise and Square Enix may have removed the game from the service to fully benefit from the increase in awareness and resultant demand.
• 15 (32%) of the titles added to the services tracked were classified as Action Adventure. Two of these were added to French-based service SFR Jeux: American Fugitive (Curve Digital) and Ben 10 (Outright Games). Ben 10 was also accessible through the PlayStation Now and Orange Jeux catalogues in March 2022.
• Microids was the most active publisher in March 2022. It brought Asterix & Obelix: Slap Them All! and Gear Club Unlimited 2 – Ultimate Edition to Blacknut; and Asterix & Obelix XXL 3: The Crystal Menhir and The Sisters – Party of the Year ­to Sunrise Game Cloud. In March 2022, Microids included 42 distinct games in eight of the subscription services tracked by Ampere. Six of the services are operated in partnership with a telco, demonstrating Microids’ focus on engaging a casual gaming audience.
• Six games were added to XGP via Console and PC on ‘day one,’ up from four the month prior. All the titles were from third-party publishers: Young Souls (The Arcade Crew), Far: Changing Tides (Frontier Developments), Weird West (Devolver Digital), Shredders (FoamPunch), Norco (Raw Fury), A Memoir Blue (Annapurna Interactive). In the first quarter of 2022 ‘day one’ releases on the service reached 16, up from just three in the first quarter of 2021. During this time, launch day releases became an established growth strategy for the service, acting as one of the key drivers for adoption.

Sony blends PlayStation Plus and Now in its subscription service restructure

Previously covered by Ampere, Sony announced a major restructuring of its subscription services. It revealed three PlayStation Plus tiers that merge PlayStation Now and Plus into a single product:

• PlayStation Plus Essential: Includes all the same benefits of the current PlayStation Plus subscription with no rise in price ($9.99, €8.99, £6.99 per month)
• PlayStation Plus Extra: All the benefits of Essential plus access to a catalogue of around 400 PlayStation 4 and 5 games ($14.99, €13.99, £10.99 per month)
• PlayStation Plus Premium: All the benefits of Essential and Extra plus around 340 games from the original PlayStation, 2, 3, and PSP consoles ($17.99, €16.99, £13.99 per month)
  1. Cloud streaming via PlayStation 4 and 5 consoles and PC for select titles
  2. In markets without cloud streaming a Deluxe tier will be offered at a lower price, but some features and content will be inaccessible

Sony’s new subscription strategy will position the company to compete more effectively with Microsoft’s overall offer. Consumers looking to purchase a console outright, or those who own both consoles will factor in PlayStation’s subscriptions when choosing where to allocate spending. PlayStation Plus offers discounts for quarterly and yearly subscriptions, locking users in long-term, a feature that XGP is missing. An annual subscription to PlayStation Plus Premium will cost $99.99/€99.99/£83.99, significantly less than 12 months of XGP Ultimate at $179.88/€155.88/£131.88. With some users choosing subscriptions as a more ‘affordable’ approach to gaming, this may be the deciding factor for a subset of consumers.

That being said, PlayStation Plus will continue to primarily offer catalogue content, and without the inclusion of launch day or early releases, the services will struggle to win over gamers who are interested in playing the newest games. The restructuring will be more effective in generating additional revenue from existing PlayStation console owners or subscribers, rather than directly competing with XGP. Ampere Games’ subscription data demonstrated that in 2021, less than 10% of those with a subscription on the PlayStation platform subscribed to PlayStation Now. The reform hopes to close this gap and see current PlayStation Plus subscribers move up the tiers, with the mid-tier offering a cheaper option than the current combined cost of PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now.

Gamestream and Blacknut home in on casual gamers

The B2B cloud gaming provider Gamestream announced partnerships with six publishers in March 2022: Daedalic Entertainment, HandyGames, Tate Multimedia, tinyBuild, Unfinished Pixel and Vector Unit. This brought 13 titles to its catalogue and made the selection available to the company’s telco partners, including Bouygues Telecom (Pleio) and Sunrise (Sunrise Game Cloud). Telco-based services primarily target casual gamers who do not own a dedicated gaming device, and small scale publishers use this as an opportunity to monetise an audience that would not have engaged with its IP otherwise.

Blacknut launched a web app that provides a browser native experience on any device that supports Safari or Chrome. This comes one year after the launch of its progressive web application that allowed iOS owners to use Blacknut on their iPhone or iPad. Prior, users needed to download an app to their device that would then stream the games via the cloud. By removing this barrier, more users without a dedicated gaming device, or a device with limited storage space, can subscribe to the service.