PS Plus is good, but spending £ 70 on a video game is not (photo: Sony)
One reader is impressed with the revamped PS Plus, but believes its main problem is that it makes PS5 games look even worse value for money.
Sony’s new PlayStation Plus subscription service arrived in the UK this Thursday. There has been some criticism about problems with the premium level, but I see more and more that the Extra Extra level offers very good value. At £ 10.99 it’s the same as my Netflix subscription and gives me access to a large selection of PlayStation 4 games.
I will have access to some high profile PlayStation 5 titles like Returnal, Guardians Of The Galaxy and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Since I’m already paying £ 6.99 to access online games with the Essential level, this only cost me £ 4 more than what I’m already paying anyway.
Some people have compared it unfavorably to the Xbox Game Pass. It’s true that PS Plus doesn’t match Xbox’s offer of free AAA games at launch, but Microsoft currently sells the Game Pass as a loss leader, meaning they sell it at a loss to attract customers for profit. long term. . They will not be able to maintain this indefinitely. They will have to raise prices or offset losses through other means, such as increased use of microtransactions.
Sony’s approach of charging a standard price for new games, allowing developers to recoup their development costs, but ultimately making the game available to more people by subscribing, seems the right balance. I would say it is certainly as good as we might expect from a sustainable business model.
That said, while I think this new subscription service offers good value, I can’t say the same about Sony’s current pricing for the new titles. On the PlayStation 4, a new game cost me £ 55. Since I bought a PlayStation 5, it has jumped to £ 70, which has kept me from buying new titles.
Both Returnal and the new Rachet & Clank seemed appealing to me. With £ 50 I would have taken them both, at £ 60 I could have taken one of them, but at £ 70 I just didn’t think it was worth it, so I skipped them both. I will now play Returnal for a fraction of this cost using the new subscription and wait for Rachet & Clank to join.
There may be one or two games for which I reluctantly cough up the 70 pounds (God Of War: Ragnarök), but for the most part I see myself skipping most of Sony’s new releases, instead of expect them to catch them with a lot of discounts or in part. of this new subscription service a few years later.
They certainly don’t make as much money with me compared to if they had more reasonable prices, especially now I expect most of them to show up on the subscription service a year or two after launch.
Maybe this new subscription service will gradually force Sony to realize that, after all, taking out £ 70 for new games is a bad idea!
From reader Daniel of Leicester
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