The March PS+ games that got the most players
How many players used their PlayStation Plus sub to play March's Essential-tier additions? Also, we share data on folks playing PS+ games long after they claim them.
Every month, Sony adds new games for all PlayStation Plus subscribers to claim, via the Essential tier. Players have a one-month window to claim these games and can access them for as long as they have an active PS+ subscription.
Between March 3 and April 6, PS+ subscribers could claim PGA Tour 2K25, Slime Rancher 2, Monster Hunter Rise, and Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road Collection.
Let’s see how many players used their PS+ subscriptions to access these games for the first time.
PGA Tour 2K25 nearly triples its PlayStation audience via PS+
PGA Tour 2K25 took the top spot out of the four, bringing in 914K new players via its PS+. PGA Tour 2K25 had a pre-existing base of roughly 500K on PS5, so PS+ nearly tripled its footprint on the platform.
Our estimates show that native-English-speaking territories accounted for 70% of PGA’s PS+ influx, with the US (44%) and the UK (13%) being the top two countries. This distribution mostly mirrors the organic retail performance.
Meanwhile, Slime Rancher 2 took #2 out of March 2026’s PS+ monthly games, pulling in nearly 750K new players. While it might seem surprising to see a niche indie outperforming a heavyweight like Monster Hunter, there’s an explanation.
Slime Rancher 2 had only sold roughly 173K units on PlayStation before its addition as a monthly PS+ game. With such a massive pool of untapped players, Slime Rancher 2 had much more room to grow compared to the saturated market of established AAA hits.
The majority of players stopped playing before reaching the one-hour mark, however – a trend that holds for many of the more niche games of previous months. Low barrier to entry, low barrier to exit, and all that.
Our data shows that 60% of the new players never touched the original Slime Rancher. So even if a large chunk of that audience hasn’t pushed past the first hour yet, the PS+ addition has added some brand awareness.
Why the bigger franchises got the fewest players
Monster Hunter Rise at #3 (397K new players via PS+) is a great example of why context matters in subscription data like this. On first glance, you’d expect a Monster Hunter to take the top spot and easily crack a million. The thing is, though, the addressable audience on PlayStation had already been thinned out.
Before its Essential debut, Rise had already sold over 1M units across PS4 and PS5, so that’s one factor. Another, bigger reason is that Rise was previously available via PS+ Extra’s game catalogue for a full year, between June 2024 and June 2025.
That means some of the player interest was exhausted during that initial twelve-month window, despite it via a higher PS+ tier.
As you can see in the Alinea platform screenshot below, we’ve made it easy to track overlapping availability windows, so it’s simple to understand why a massive IP like Monster Hunter pulled in less:
Exporting this data from the platform, we can see that:
When Monster Hunter Rise first hit PS+ Extra in June 2024, it saw an immediate spike of 304K new players in its first week alone.
Over its year-long stint on Extra, Monster Hunter Rise successfully netted 1.3M new players via the subscription. That was a massive amount of subscription-first demand already fulfilled.
By the time March 2026 rolled around, the addressable audience of PS-subbed players was lower. The first-week spike for its lower-tier Essential debut was 115K players – a healthy number, but less than half of the engagement seen during its initial 2024 entry.
Most of the “easy” subscription conversions happened back in 2024, even at the higher tier. This Essential addition was effectively capturing the remaining stragglers – and some newer subscribers – at the lower tier.
F2P games can also boost players via PS+, but converting them to paying customers is another question
Elder Scrolls Online (ESO): Gold Road Collection added 287K new players to the ecosystem via PS+. Again, while that number might seem modest compared to PGA and Slime Rancher 2, ESO is a tough comparison as a legacy live-service title with a history on PlayStation.
Almost 5M PlayStation players had already engaged with ESO before its addition. As it’s a free-to-play MMO, adding 287K new players is pretty significant. These players technically could have accessed ESO for free earlier.
This suggests that putting free-to-play games on subscriptions can offer some curated visibility and permanence for games like this. Although, having ‘’Elder Scrolls’’ in the title certainly helps…
Of course, there is a clear strategic limit to this offering. While Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road Collection is comprehensive, bundling the core game with all major previous expansion, it doesn’t include content from 2025 and beyond.
ESO is theoretically giving players a massive, high-value foundation to lower the barrier to entry, specifically to drive them toward the battle pass and other in-game purchases.
Historically, most players do bounce off in the first couple of hours via subscriptions, but it’s difficult to deny that ESO’s PS+ addition has boosted the game’s ecosystem on PlayStation. Just look at our DAU estimates on PlayStation. The blue dashed line is when ESO was added:
In the end, a game’s performance as a PS+ monthly game depends on a range of factors, including release date, previous service availability, pre-existing sales, and regional appeal.
Before we finish, we just wanted to highlight that PS+ monthly games also have the added quirk of players being able to claim in the window, then download later. A lot of players do this.
Back in February, we posted some estimates about January’s PS+ monthly games, and we’ve got some updated data. As of yesterday:
Need for Speed Unbound added 1.8M new players via its PS Essential addition, and about 270K of these (15%) downloaded the game outside of the claim window.
Epic Mickey Rebrushed added 1.5M (17% after the claim window) and Core Keeper added 581K (15% after the window).
Subscribers, then, really seem to value the claim now, play later added value.
I know I do during busier times.
Cool links and other stuff
Our friends at Aream & Co. have released their Q1 2026 Video Game Update, including PC and console data and insights from us. As always, it’s a pleasure to work with Aream. The report is awesome and well worth a read. You can download it here.
Some of our Marathon analysis has continued to make the rounds, including in IGN and Forbes
We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply to this email, and we’ll set you up.
The last word
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