Checking In On PS+ December 2023

We have had a full calendar year of Playstation Plus Essential, Extra, and Premium. So which tiers should we be paying attention to? And which plan is for you?

Much of this discussion was driven by the news that PS Now, Sony’s closest thing to an Xbox Game Pass competitor, would be shut down and effectively rebranded as a part of the subscription tiers. It’s been over a year and a half since the relaunch, and discussion over the value of the various tiers has reignited after Sony announced a significant price hike a few months back.

While the general consensus online has been that despite the Essential and even Extra tiers having been a solid value, at least before the price hike, the same can not be said about Premium.

The Essential tier grants access to online services, as well as the ability to add three curated games each month (two PS4 and one PS5). The Extra tier also provides you with access to a library of games to download, including major first-party titles like Horizon Forbidden West, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, The Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection, Sackboy: A Big Adventure, and even a few Day One third-party releases such as Stray.

In addition to the perks of the Essential and Extra tiers, Premium also grants access to a library of classic titles, the ability to stream games, as well as select game trials. The problem for most gamers lies with the lack of updates for this Premium tier. A lot of Sony’s marketing around the rebrand took into account the seeming lack of value in the Premium tier at launch and strongly implied the future growth of the classics collection over time. Despite this, a year after launch they had only added 21 PS1 games and 14 PSP games, with little to no PS2 or PS3 games added over the entire time. 

While there are PS2 and PS3 games offered on the service, they are mostly the same titles that have been there since launch, with the majority being holdovers from the PS Now collection. To make matters worse, the PS2 catalog is sorely lacking with only 24 total titles offered. To be fair to Sony, there is a known issue with their PS2 emulator on the PS5 that causes textures to load weirdly as well as causing other games to run poorly in general. There are also concerns over the PS2 emulator’s JIT privileges, which could provide access that Sony would certainly like to avoid. Despite these issues, many fans had hoped a new emulator was in the works to solve these problems. So far, there hasn’t been any news on that front, leaving fans with dying hope while some of the most beloved titles of all time stay sitting on the shelf. 

While this lack of added value to their most expensive subscription tier had already been a growing concern for gamers, the significant price hike quietly announced around the start of September only made matters worse. Toward the end of a monthly blog post going over the new  PS Plus Essential games, the company stated that starting September 6th, the price of all three tiers would be increasing:

• Essential would go from $60 a year to $80

• Extra would go from $100 a year to $135

• Premium would go from $120 a year up to $160

As part of their push to justify the price hike, Sony attributed market conditions as well as a lack of raising prices incrementally along with their competitors as the main reasons for the increase. 

Sony Interactive Entertainment’s business chief Eric Lempel was quoted saying, “This price adjustment will enable us to continue bringing high-quality games and value-added benefits to your PlayStation Plus subscription service.”

While there have been a couple perks added over the last year, most recently access to a library of around 100 Sony movies free via the Sony Pictures Core App, most don’t see that as a major selling point. After all, we all have plenty of access to free shows and movies with apps like Tubi and Pluto TV, let alone whatever paid services we have the password for. It remains to be seen how Sony will continue to address user concerns, but many are taking the opportunity to downgrade to a lower tier before their current subscription ends. 

At the end of the day, whether or not a given tier is worth the cost for you is going to come down to your habits and needs. For most casual gamers, the essential tier is all that is needed. It offers access to play games online with your friends and a few new games each month. The quality of the free games is even sometimes really good, with some first party Sony games in the mix after a couple years on the market. 

If you’re more of a hobby gamer, then the extra tier is probably the best value at this time. You get all the same stuff as the essential tier but also get access to a fairly impressive library of PS4 and PS5 games. We’ve spent plenty of time digging into titles we had forgotten about or just ones that sounded interesting. That’s the beauty of any game subscription service: the ability to just try things out on a whim.

While we think the value of both the Essential and Extra tiers is solid depending on your gaming habits, the Premium is not worth the cost for most people at this time. Even as someone who downgraded from Premium after the price increase news, we can honestly say we are still relatively optimistic about the future of this tier. There are just too many good classic titles that Sony can pull from. Hopefully they will start to put more of an emphasis on their classic library because if they gave it the time and care it deserves, it could be a really special collection which actually justifies the cost.