Sony Interactive Entertainment
As Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass service continues to accumulate subscribers, its closest competitor Sony has recently swept back with changes and upgrades to its PlayStation Plus service. The lead up to the PlayStation Plus relaunch required a few explanations, most notably the varying pricing and absorption of the cloud-streaming PlayStation Now service.
The dust has since settled enough to see the PlayStation Plus overhaul in action for over two months, and as far as value for money goes, Sony ranks highly. If you prepay for the ‘premium’ tier, you can access hundreds of games from every PlayStation generation for $10 a month, including a good mix of hits and critically acclaimed indies (along with hundreds of games that set neither sales charts nor critics. ‘ lists on fire).
However, Sony isn’t ready to meet Microsoft in one major sales pitch: a subscription to first-party games available on launch day. If you want to play new games in exclusive Sony series like god of war or The last of us, which will continue to charge a full MSRP at launch; Xbox Game Pass is more generous with day-one access to all its games, from Halo Infinite until Forza Motorsport. PlayStation Plus’s apparent counterpart came in a new ‘classic’ library, exclusive to the service’s most expensive tier, which would include the PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable game libraries.
Count on “up to 340” classics
But so far, PlayStation Plus doesn’t feel representative of that original target of the classics library, and a blog post from Wednesday suggests Sony is dragging its feet.
The latest PlayStation Plus blog post confirmed that 11 games would land on the premium and “extra” tiers of the service in August. While this list includes three solid games from Sega Yakuza series, and the quirky strains of modern indie bugsnax and classic RPG remake Trials of Mana, it does not include games from any Sony console library outside of PS4 and PS5. That follows a July addition of just three “classic” games, all from the PSP to PS Plus.
As a reminder, the PS Plus classics launched in June with 27 games from the trio of systems mentioned above: 11 for PS1, 24 for PS2, and two for PSP. Two months later we are up to 30 conversions of the original versions of those consoles. And now that we’ve done the math, we’re concerned that those libraries won’t get much bigger unless Sony revises its ads.
Sony tells PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers that its classics will grow to “up to 340” games, but this number includes titles that were already on the PlayStation Now streaming service, which revolves almost exclusively around PlayStation 3 games. North American PS Plus Premium subscribers have access to 294 PS3 games (although about five of these are iterative updates or DLC packs). Add 30 to that and you have 16 possible additions.
Sony has yet to emulate PS3 games on native PS5 or PS4 hardware, so these will need to be streamed from the cloud. That’s largely different from the service’s PS1, PS2, and PSP games, which can be downloaded and rendered natively with no cloud-induced issues with latency or pixel fidelity. So some owners of modern consoles eager to play classic games may find Sony’s current total of “324” classics misleading, as long as their internet connection or data cap proves prohibitive.
There are so many exclusive offers missing on PS1, PS2, PSP and PS3
Third-party contracts and arrangements limit the console maker’s ability to publish additional classic games. For example, to republish EA Sports classics from the 90s on PlayStation Plus, Sony would not only have to shake hands with EA, but also negotiate deals with athletes and other potential licensees represented in older games. But Sony’s entire content on the first three consoles is plentiful enough that it could dump 16 more games on PlayStation Plus tomorrow and still have dozens of games left to choose from, should it ever upgrade the program in the future. (And to clarify, PlayStation Plus Premium already includes third-party rates from the PS1, PS2, and PSP eras created by studios such as Capcom, Bandai Namco, Team 17, and THQ Nordic.)
Sony can be content with keeping its classic game publishing plans to a minimum, while emphasizing modern PS Plus additions like Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade and strayed. The company can blow up its roster of classics with hundreds of games that had been on the existing PlayStation Now service for years, all before being folded into the more famous PlayStation Plus fold. (We’ve talked about Sony’s PlayStation Now branding issue before.) But while PlayStation Now’s selection of PS3 games contains some gems, it lacks some of the PS3’s best exclusives, including the wild animal game. Tokyo Junglethe local multiplayer madness of Call all carsthe quirky puzzle platformer puppeteersequel in the series owned by Sony kill zone and Resistanceand the PS3 classic Metal Gear Solid 4.
Perhaps Sony will change its classic publishing tune as the new gloss of PlayStation Plus wears off to generate headlines and attract new customers. But for those PlayStation fans who pre-purchased a full year of PS Plus Premium with the expectation that Sony will celebrate its ’90s and early ’00s reign, the wait is apparently going to be tough, especially since Microsoft has a hardware store. -agnostic approach pushes to attract more gamers. Sony representatives have not immediately responded to Ars Technica’s questions about what to expect from PlayStation Plus’s classic game offerings in the coming months.
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