It's worth noting that PS Now numbers are growing as well and at least there we know those are customers willing to pay full price. All of Game Pass's discounts make it harder to separate the dedicated crowd who might stay with the service from the impulse buy crowd who just wanted to spend a couple of bucks to play a game or check it out.
And I know that might not necessarily be the point as more points of engagement are what's important for a growing sub model, but I felt it was worth noting that it might not neccarily be a full apples to apples comparison between the 2 services right now. Both services will grow but we'll have to wait and see how they evolve for next gen and how effective they are in retaining subscribers.
Personally I think Sony should and will be eventually offering a Now/Plus hybrid tier not unlike GPU and will be making efforts to convert their 38 million or so PS+ subscribers to that higher model. That'll be the starting point for further expanding their sub base imo. I don't think these efforts will really kick off until the move to Azure is complete and possibly the PS5 hardware is ready to be put into datacenters. Right now I feel they're in a bit of a holding pattern with Now as they wait for certain things like Azure and PS5 to be ready. In the meantime they're still refining the service to improve its performance.
absolutely and my predictions earlier are, like everyone else right now, guesswork.
We won't know how the subscription landscape turns out before all factors are fully in play.
I still think it's a better move from Microsoft to go for the pc crowd instead of trying to sway the hardcore PlayStation fans.