PS Plus is good, but spending £ 70 on a video game is not (photo: Sony)
The reader is impressed with the redesigned PS Plus, but thinks his biggest problem is that it makes PS5 games look even worse value for money.
The new Sony PlayStation Plus subscription service reached the United Kingdom this Thursday. There have been several criticisms of first-class issues, but I increasingly see the middle additional level as offering very good value. Priced at £ 10.99, it’s the same as my Netflix subscription and gives me access to a great selection of PlayStation 4 games.
I’ll get access to some popular PlayStation 5 titles like Returnal, Guardians Of The Galaxy and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Given that I already pay £ 6.99 to access Essential-level online games, this only costs me £ 4 more than I already pay.
Some people compare it unfavorably to the Xbox Game Pass. It is true that PS Plus does not respond to Xbox’s offer of free AAA games when they are released, but Microsoft is currently selling the Game Pass as a loss leader. . They will not be able to continue this indefinitely. They will either have to raise prices or compensate for losses by other means, such as the increased use of microtransactions.
Sony’s approach of charging a standard price for new games, allowing developers to recoup development costs but then ultimately making the game available to more people through a subscription, feels like the right balance. I would say it is certainly as good as we can expect from a sustainable business model.
All things considered, although I think this new subscription service offers good value, I can’t say the same about Sony’s current prices for new titles. On the PlayStation 4, a new game cost me £ 55. Ever since I bought the PlayStation 5, it has jumped to a ridiculous £ 70, which really repelled me from buying new titles.
Both Returnal and the new Rachet & Clank seemed attractive to me. At £ 50 I would grab both, at £ 60 I might grab one of them, but at £ 70 I just didn’t feel it was worth it, so I missed both. I will now play Returnal for part of that price using the new subscription and will wait for Rachet & Clank to eventually join it.
There may be one or two games for which he reluctantly coughs the full £ 70 (God Of War: Ragnarök), but for the most part I see that I miss most of the new releases of Sony, instead I hope to catch them or with a sharp reduction, or part of this new subscription service after a few years.
They certainly don’t make that much money from me compared to if they had more reasonable prices, especially now I expect most of them to appear in the subscription service a year or two after launch.
Maybe this new subscription service will gradually force Sony to realize that eventually pulling us out with £ 70 for new games is a bad idea!
From reader Daniel of Leicester
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