PS Plus won't add an exclusive game like Horizon Forbidden West again

PS Plus Extra is losing Horizon Forbidden West for PS5 and PS4. What makes it even sadder is that Sony won't ever try this PlayStation Studios experiment again!

PS Plus won't add an exclusive game like Horizon Forbidden West again
Kes Eylers-Stephenson

Opinion by Kes Eylers-Stephenson

Published

Did you get the memo? PS Plus Extra is losing Horizon Forbidden West. Amongst the games leaving PS Plus this month, the second mainline entry in the series is going to be leaving alongside 13 other PS5 and PS4 games on Tuesday, September 17, 2024. While it's a real shame to see one of the best PS Plus games leave, Sony won't ever be adding games of this scale from its first-party catalog that early again.

Kes
Kes —

Horizon Forbidden West was a failed PS Plus Extra experiment

Since the inception of the new PS Plus Extra tier, everyone has been wondering how Sony would use a game catalog subscription to showcase its array of PlayStation Studios games. Well, PlayStation executives have long been clear that they don't think adding AAA games on day one to PS Plus will help recoup the development cost.
The former temporary CEO of PlayStation and current CFO of Sony, Hikori Totoki, has stated before that: "AAA titles on PlayStation 5, if we distribute them on the subscription service we may need to shrink the investment needed for that. That will deteriorate the first-party title quality.”

This message stands in stark contrast to Xbox Game Pass' former strategy of adding day one Xbox exclusives. It's not like Sony didn't experiment with this strategy, however. Nearly a year after Horizon Forbidden West's release on February 22, 2022, Sony added Horizon Forbidden West to PS Plus Extra in February 2023. Not day one, sure, but close enough to launch to be groundbreaking in terms of the way Sony was using PS Plus for its first-party games.

While truly wonderful for PS5 and PS4 gamers who waited for Horizon Forbidden West, the result for Sony was financially horrible. Some leaked documentation on ResetEra (some of which has now been deleted) showcased that long-term sales of HFW flatlined compared to the massive sales tail of the first game, Horizon Zero Dawn.
In the presentation, you can see that in line with Horizon Zero Dawn, Guerrilla Games was projecting a 30% year-on-year revenue from retail sales worth $124 million. Instead, the second year only brought in $35 million, or 9% of year-on-year revenue, representing a possible loss of $85 million.

That loss would equate to around a third of Horizon Forbidden West's reported $212 million budget. You can claim, quite rightly, that PS5 sales were down at the time and Horizon Zero Dawn had a bigger PS4 market to play with. That's true, and as a result, the sequel may not have reached that high year-on-year turnover.

However, every other PS4 and PS5 exclusive from 2017 onwards, from Days Gone to Ghost of Tsushima, has over double the year-on-year retail sales of HFW. In short, by putting Horizon Forbidden West on PS Plus Extra only a year after release, Sony lost an absurd amount of money.

Imagine the loss on a day-one game, especially given the $85 million almost certainly wasn't re-couped by an increased number of PS Plus subscriptions. During that 2023 period, the service had roughly 47 million subscribers, though Sony has ceased reporting them since.
If you needed more proof that this strategy of adding in-house AAA exclusives to your subscription service doesn't work, Take Two's CEO Strauss Zelnick (you know, the guy in charge of GTA) has made it repeatedly clear that day one PS Plus and Xbox Game Pass strategies don't work for the company.

The final straw? Well, only recently Microsoft made a huge Xbox Game Pass day one games change. Game Pass Ultimate kept day-one Xbox games around for $5 a month more as the Standard tier dropped them entirely. What does that tell you? Xbox needs a lot more money to keep day-one games on its subscription remotely sustainable.

Kes

Why does this mean no more PlayStation Studios games on PS Plus?

So, between the Xbox changes and Sony's losses in bringing an early PS5 exclusive game like Horizon to PS Plus, the result feels inevitable. There is simply no way Sony is going to try a Horizon-style experiment ever again with its AAA PlayStation Studios exclusives on PS Plus.
Sony might try day one with its new PlayStation Studios live-service games that require high engagement or by paying for third-party games to come to PS Plus Extra. We've already seen the latter succeed and we even think PS Plus Extra should copy Game Pass by using third-party games as great engagement tools.

However, the single-player games that define PlayStation? They'll never be on PS Plus that close to launch again. If you want a deeper dive into the world of Aloy, check out the Horizon games ranked because I think Horizon Forbidden West is the best of them! What do you think of Horizon leaving PS Plus? Will we ever see a AAA single-player exclusive game on there again? Let us know in the comments below, TrueTrophies analysts!
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Written by Kes Eylers-Stephenson
Editor-in-Chief Kes is our resident expert in PlayStation and Sony news. He writes about PS5 games like The Witcher IV, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and Kingdom Come Deliverance II using experience from years of PlayStation gaming. He also covers PS Plus news and some of the best PS5 games — Uncharted, God of War, and The Last of Us — before an evening swim.
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