PS Plus March 2025 lineup marks Sony’s first upset of the year

Sony’s PS Plus Essential subscription tier has gone from strength to strength in 2025, with the last two monthly game lineups pulling in more active subscribers than any selection of games offering in 2024 or even most of 2023. So, it’s a bit of a shame to see PS Plus March 2025’s player count break Sony’s winning streak — especially when the games this month were quite good too!

• PS Plus March 2025‘s games debuted with a 15.2% decrease in active players compared to February 2025’s lineup
• It’s a surprise downturn given the strength of the lineup as a whole and the recency of those Dragon Age The Veilguard trophies
• That said, March’s selection of games still performed better than most PS Plus lineups from 2024

Using a gameplay data sample from over 3.4 million active PSN accounts (courtesy of our partnership with Game Trends, which draws most of its PSN data from sources beyond TrueTrophies), we’ve kept track of the debut player count for every PS5 and PS4 game made available via PS Plus Essential.
This includes March 2025’s PS Plus Essential games lineup of Dragon Age The Veilguard, Sonic Colors Ultimate, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Cowabunga Collection — all of which were made available to PS Plus subscribers on Tuesday, March 4, 2025.

After last month’s PS Plus games managed to score one of the biggest subscriber turnouts in nearly two years off the back of admittedly mid games like Payday 3 and High on Life, you had to presume this month was going to be big. I mean, you’ve got a Dragon Age game that’s only a few months old, a pretty good Sonic the Hedgehog game, and some multiplayer TMNT classics. What’s not to love?

Well, apparently something didn’t quite click with subscribers, because this is the first downturn in performance PS Plus Essential has seen this year. March 2025’s games saw 15.2% fewer subscribers than the previous month’s titles, and 10.8% fewer players than January 2025’s monthly games. Yes, a worse turnout than the game selection led by the legitimately bad Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League.

At a glance, it seems the biggest source of disappointment comes from Dragon Age The Veilguard, which saw 8.2% fewer players than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Cowabunga Collection despite being the headline game. You’d have thought that a big, shiny new PS5 game would have piqued a lot more player curiosity, but it seems a mix of bad press and bad timing (I mean, the year just started to get good, who has time for an RPG out of nowhere?) may have hurt it.

Granted, it’s still worth bearing in mind that this year’s PS Plus Essential games have been considerably more popular than 2024’s offerings. Glance at this chart above and you’ll see that even though we’re only three months into the year, half the list has already been taken up by 2025 releases.

Even Dragon Age The Veilguard didn’t do that badly — it sits a little below the top ten at #12! It’s just a disappointing performance when you consider the recency of the game and the novelty of such a big title coming to PS Plus. As a result, March 2025 marks Sony’s first downturn in monthly PS Plus subscriber interest this year.

It’s also the first lineup this year to perform worse with subscribers than any of 2024’s PS Plus Essential updates. The player count for March 2025’s games fell 3.9% short of October 2024’s incredibly strong selection of Dead Space, WWE 2K24, and Doki Doki Literature Club Plus. Again, that suggests it was a decent turnout overall, but a disappointment compared to the performance of the last two PS Plus giveaways.

It’s a shame, but at the end of the day, 2025 still seems to be a really solid year for PS Plus subscribers so far. What do you make of the slight dip in interest for this month’s lineup? Make sure to snap them up before these games leave PS Plus! Then let us know your thoughts down in the comments below.