Monthly round-up: PlayStation Plus added five Dragon Quest titles

From September 2022 to October 2022, 189 games were added to the services tracked (up from 88 last month) and 138 were removed (up from 50 last month) in the US.

These are the main games subscription catalogue changes in October 2022 from the US catalogues:

• 30 titles were added to both PlayStation Plus Premium/Deluxe and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Five titles were added to PlayStation Plus Premium/Deluxe from the Dragon Quest franchise by publisher Square Enix, including Dragon Quest Heroes II: Digital Explorer’s Edition, and Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below. All the titles were also added to PlayStation Plus Extra and two – Dragon Quest Builders 2 and Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age – were included in the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate catalogue. The franchise’s increased distribution on subscription services will help expand its audience prior to the release of its five upcoming games, including Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate.
• 28 titles were removed from Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Notable titles removed included A Plague Tale: Innocence (Focus Entertainment), Final Fantasy XIII (Square Enix), and Dirt 4 (EA). A Plague Tale: Innocence was first added to Game Pass in January 2020, where it stayed for just over two years. After being removed in October 2022, the sequel – A Plague Tale: Requiem (Focus Entertainment) – was added to the service on ‘day one’. Older games in a franchise are often licensed into a subscription service to boost awareness of a new release. However, in A Plague Tale’s case, the launch day inclusion of the latest game meant it made more commercial sense to drop the older title out of the service to take advantage of any incremental premium sales driven by a boost in franchise awareness.     

Persona 5 Royal targets a global audience with Xbox Game Pass launch

Eight games were released on ‘day one’ on Xbox Game Pass Console and PC in October 2022, down from nine the month prior, including Paw Patrol Grand Prix (Outright Games), Persona 5 Royal (Sega), and Scorn (Kepler Interactive). Persona 5 Royal was initially released in Japan for the PlayStation 4 in October 2019, and globally in March 2022. The franchise has largely been exclusive to PlayStation with all but two mainline titles (Persona 4 Golden, Sega; Revelations: Persona, Atlus) available only on Sony’s devices. Alongside its day and date launch on Xbox Game Pass, the title was also released on Nintendo Switch and PC, with previous franchise instalments due to launch on other platforms in January 2023.

The Persona franchise has long remained exclusive to Sony as PlayStation consoles have an established user base in its domestic market, Japan. The franchise has historically targeted gamers in the market, electing to launch titles in Japan before a global release. This is understandable as the title is a JRPG and gamers in Japan were more likely than those in any other market to state that RPGs were their favourite genre in Ampere’s Games Consumer survey (Q2 2022). For Microsoft, licensing Persona will increase the attractiveness of its subscription service to gamers in Japan and improve its competitiveness with Sony in regard to content.

In October 2022, Sega disclosed that the Persona 5 series (including all spin-offs and editions) had sold 7.22m units globally, 77% of which were attributable to overseas sales (as of March 2022). The strong global performance instilled confidence in Sega that its domestic IP can succeed in the broader games market. To target this audience, Sega must expand its touch points to previously unsupported platforms, as a large share of global consumers play on other consoles or PC. Xbox Game Pass presents an opportunity to reach a large pool of Western gamers, many of which may be unfamiliar with the franchise due to its prior exclusivity. With low barriers to entry, the subscription service will broaden Persona 5 Royal’s player base and direct this attention to spin-offs, historical releases, and other Persona media (e.g. Persona 5: The Animation).

Blacknut announced two publisher partnerships

In October 2022, Blacknut revealed two new partnerships with publishers Blowfish Studios and Fulqrum Publishing, which will see a total of 43 titles added to the subscription service by the end of Q4 2022. Blowfish Studios intends to bring 11 titles to the service: the publisher included one title (The Deer God) in PlayStation Now before its relaunch in May 2022 and one title (Projection: First Light) in Apple Arcade from June 2021 to July 2022.

Fulqrum Publishing will add 32 titles to Blacknut, and the publisher has already included three in its catalogue: Forgive Me Father and Through the Woods were added in October 2022, and Quantum Replica was available from May 2022. The two partnerships will bring different content to the service, with Blowfish Studios creating indie content like Winter Ember and Catie in MeowmeowLand, and Fulqrum Publishing known for its franchises like King’s Bounty, Men of War, and Space Rangers.

These deals are unlikely to be worth a lot to the publisher up-front, but will provide an incremental revenue opportunity moving forward, while Blacknut continues to scale its catalogue offering. There is also a chance these games will make their way to Blacknut’s white label deployments and provide a gateway to entirely new audiences in less-established markets, such as through telcos Celcom in Malaysia and M1 in Singapore.

Netflix talks publicly about its cloud gaming strategy

Netflix confirmed that it is pressing ahead with its plans to offer streaming distribution for its gaming content, suggesting that internal testing must have progressed well and that the commercial ramifications of such a move are not enough to deter the company at this point. Initially, we expect Netflix to experiment with streaming of mobile games as a value-added alternative to downloading games, if it can develop an appropriate implementation that works under app store guidelines. Read a deeper Ampere analysis of Netflix’s cloud gaming strategy at this link.