Sony CEO Jim Ryan is rumored to be not seeing Xbox Game Pass as something worth vying with over market dominance, according to one of Insider Gaming's anonymous sources.

"When we consider Game Pass, we’ve sold more PS5’s in two years than they have gathered subscribers and they’ve been doing that for 6-7 years,” Ryan reportedly said during a Q&A employee session held earlier this month. He also supposedly added that "Sony is just shy of 50 million subscribers and they are in the low 20s, but there’s more work to do to grow that number”.

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The number of PlayStation subscribers reached 45.4 million as of September 2022, which was a notable decrease from its peak of 48 million subscribers in December 2021, according to Statista. In comparison, the number of Xbox Game Pass subscribers is estimated at approximately 25 million, according to Microsoft's recent estimation revealed in its response to the Competition and Markets Authority's statement about the Activision-Blizzard acquisition deal, so Microsoft's Game Pass subscriber numbers are certainly not in the low 20s at the moment.

Ryan's statement could also be seen as conflicting with Sony's own response to the CMA statement, in which it is explicitly said that Sony is concerned that "a significant number of PlayStation users would likely switch to Xbox and/or Game Pass" following Xbox's acquisition of Activision-Blizzard and the Call of Duty IP. Moreover, Sony believes that empowering the position of Microsoft's subscription and cloud services – which are described as "leading" and "well-established" – could lead to a number of harmful repercussions on the gaming industry down the road, such as weakening the negotiation position of independent developers, as well as hindering innovation due to lack of competition.

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Sony has revamped its PlayStation Plus subscription service this year to rival Microsoft's popular Xbox Game Pass, and it has achieved noteworthy success according to numbers and industry reports. However, the higher Sony's numbers go up, the weaker its opposing argument gets against Xbox's acquisition deal being dangerous for competition. Sony still hasn't provided an official clarification on Jim Ryan's rumored statements or its plans to grow the number of PlayStation Plus subscribers.

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