Don’t expect day one PS5 games on new PS Plus

Sony’s plans for a re-launched and substantially expanded PlayStation Plus have been making waves since they were detailed yesterday, and one of the most interesting bits of information has come via a Jim Ryan interview.

What is PS Plus and how much does it cost? PlayStation’s subscription service explained

Talking to Gamesindustry.biz, he revealed plenty of tidbits about how Sony is approaching the change in its membership service, with the obvious spectre in the background being Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass.

One major point of comparison between the games libraries each will offer comes around the question of release dates – Microsoft’s service gets its first-party games at no extra cost the moment they’re available, from Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite to Starfield when it arrives.

That’s not the approach PlayStation will take, according to Ryan: “This is not a road that we’ve gone down in the past. And it’s not a road that we’re going to go down with this new service.”

“We feel if we were to do that with the games that we make at PlayStation Studios, that virtuous cycle will be broken. The level of investment that we need to make in our studios would not be possible, and we think the knock-on effect on the quality of the games that we make would not be something that gamers want.”

That makes it sound pretty definitive for now that you won’t get free release day access to, for instance, God of War Ragnaök when it comes out, but Ryan isn’t actually quite so final, confirming that “things can change very quickly in this industry”, so PlayStation’s approach might well change down the line.