Sony’s senior director of PlayStation Now, Jack Buser, recently spoke in an interview regarding PlayStation Now’s successes thus far and its importance to the industry as a whole.
Though the streaming service launched allowing users to simply rent titles for allotted periods of time, Buser claims that since the $20 per month model was introduced, subscriptions to the service have increased 300% year to year.
A new user interface was revealed last week for the service and Buser notes the redesign was done for the users.
“If you look at usage per week, average usage is going to be about 4 hours, which is a very high engagement metric,” Buser said. “If you look at it per session, we’re looking at about 45 minutes a session, and for popular games over an hour. You can see that people are coming in, playing for very long sessions, and then they’re playing multiple sessions per week to get to that very high average per week of four hours. That’s where that new user experience becomes so important, because when you have such a large growth in your user base and they are so engaged in not just one but several games, it’s important to give them a rich user interface to help them more easily transition to other games they might not have otherwise checked out.”
User mentioned the importance that the streaming service will have on the industry, specifically when it comes to the lifecycle the industry must battle when releasing new titles.
“In the games industry, we’ve been very focused on the first few months after a game is released. Unlike our friends in the movie and music industries, there wasn’t as much of a long tail for the game industry. I think PlayStation Now has an extremely interesting role to play as the lifecycle of the game industry matures. This gives publishers the chance to rejuvenate the ability of a title to generate revenue. When we release a title into the subscription, we create quite a bit of buzz around a title that may not have been advertised for a year or two, even three years in some cases. Now because it’s coming into the subscription, gamers are talking about the title, they’re curious about the title, and it’s like this breath of fresh air into a franchise or even an individual title that previously was very difficult to do in this industry.”
For the full interview with Jack Buser, check out this link.