Tier Original Pricing. New Pricing
PS Plus Essential £49.99 / $59.99 £59.99 / $79.99
PS Plus Extra £83.99 / $99.99 £99.99 / $134.99
PS Plus Premium £99.99 / $119.99 £119.99 / $159.99
33+% is quite a hike, considering that Sony doesn't offer PS+ Day 1 Launches, unlike Xbox.
I hope they start offering their games day one, else people will start to unsubscribe.
It's a bummer, since I like PS+ Extra a lot (don't get PS+ Premium, it's not worth it)
I'm not a console owner, are PlayStation owners really giving Sony $60 a year to play online multiplayer? It shouldn't cost anything in the first place. If Valve or GoG or anyone else started trying to tell me I had to pay them extra to send certain packets through my router, I'd have a good laugh.
I’m not a console owner, are PlayStation owners really giving Sony $60 a year to play online multiplayer?
It all started with the Xbox, since people did not questioned it and received it with open arms the others (Sony and Nintendo) just copied it. It's just matter of time we end up paying on PC too
PC gaming is actually a competitive market that would still give players options to escape that (Gog, steam, Epic, itch and humble dumble, hell even Microsoft store and company launchers), it is not guaranteed to never happen because cartels happen, but it is far more hard and improbable than consoles, which are locked-down computers with unbreakable monopolies installed in then, at the mercy of the feudal lord of choice.
PS: not to mention, Piracy, emulators and Libre games on linux.
Microsoft actually tried that during the 360 era with their "Games for Windows Live" service. You had to pay Live "Gold" in order to play online for those games, the exact same subscription required for online gaming on Xbox.
The whole service was so poorly done, so intrusive, and so un-PC, that it didn't stick with PC gamers.
Nowadays, with quite a few PC gamers already paying for the Game Pass subscription and a rather streamlined experience for PC, I wonder if things would turn out differently somehow.
It was a discussion. And XBox Live was a significantly better experience than PSN. A lot of people were happy to have the premium online experience on PS4 vs the barebones PS3 experience.
To be clear, I had PS Plus on the PS3 when it was just unlocked (free-ish) games and extra discounts. And most of my favorite playstation multiplayer was on the PS3. So I was mostly indifferent to the change.
It used to be charging you to send packets through servers that they (in this case, Sony) own, but now that may or may not be the predominant use case in this era of games as a service where the developer needs to run the game through their own servers anyway. The reason Valve, Epic, and CD Projekt don't charge you for it is because you're paying for it every time you buy a game through their stores, which also used to be a less prominent situation on consoles, but now well more than half of games are bought digitally on consoles as well. So PC has taken more and more market share while consoles continue upping the price of their mandatory subscription fees for online play, and one day they'll sit there scratching their heads, wondering where all of their customers went.
While this is true, it does at least provide access to a large library of games 🤷♂️
im certainly not thrilled about the increase but when your primary game platform is ps5, what can you do
Large library of games is factually incorrect, you just do not know the scale of games in existence. Far more titles in Steam, gog, itch io, and with emulation this all goes to the square power, the largest library of games is a PC.
I never did. I only got a PS4 for single player exclusives back in the day. Refused to pay for online access and had no interest in paying a monthly fee for rentals when I already had a backlog. And had my PC for everything else.