Games With Gold’s year-end MSRP can be fairly chided for the influence of both, but not PlayStation Plus. And these aren’t Sony inflating the MSRP of a game it’s offering for free, nor are these games the dubious full-price wares of budget publishers whose catalog never goes on sale. Recently, I’ve tried to de-emphasize dollar figures as a measure of value in this analysis, but the numbers still stick out. In 2021, PlayStation Plus gave players 40 - a per-game average of $35. Since we started breaking down the offerings of PS Plus and Xbox Live Games with Gold in 2014, the $1,424.60 given out by Sony this year is second only to 2018, when the company was supporting three platforms with six games a month. And this year, PlayStation Plus gave subscribers more than $1,400 worth of video games. When we build this year-end analysis, we’re adding up the game’s listed, non-sale prices at the end of the year. Unlike Microsoft, Sony doesn’t mention the PlayStation Store’s retail price for the free games it doles out every month in the PlayStation Plus Instant Game Collection. Gamers get more choice in how they access the games they want to play and the platform holders make additional sales.The number sticks out. From where I’m standing it seems like a win-win situation as well. This flexible approach is one I hope to see Sony and Nintendo eventually replicate. Iconic games like Dead Space, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Skate 3 originally launched on the Xbox 360 and are included in the Game Pass library, but even though I have a rolling subscription, I’ve still purchased them individually to ensure I have access even if I cancel my membership down the road. But these titles can also be bought individually as well if you’d rather pick and choose. On Xbox Series X, you have the option of subscribing to Xbox Game Pass to get instant access to a massive collection of games that span four generations of Xbox consoles. I really wish PlayStation Plus would take the same approach Microsoft has with Xbox Game Pass - and I’m not even talking about offering first-party titles on day one, that’s a totally separate discussion that I won't get into here. PlayStation Plus needs to be more like Xbox Game Pass I can only effectively rent it through Nintendo’s $50 a year online subscription service. I’d love to own it for my Nintendo Switch, but I can’t. Take for example, Banjo-Kazooie, It’s one of my favorite video games of all time, and the first I can ever recall playing. Nintendo Switch Online also puts the same limit on access to NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 titles. But I’d honestly rather spend more to buy the games I wanted piecemeal than my continued access tied to an ongoing subscription service.Īs noted, Sony are not the only ones taking this approach. Of course, you could argue that $15 a month for as many as 340 classic PlayStation games represents strong value for money, and you’re not necessarily wrong (granted, we need to see the quality of games before making a final judgement call). This gives me the flexibility to temporarily pause or outright cancel my subscriptions as and went I want. It’s why I often still buy movies I really enjoy even when they are available on streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus. I appreciate that from Sony’s perspective the goal is to keep me subscribed to PlayStation Plus Premium indefinitely, but I really dislike the idea of feeling compelled to pay in perpetuity for access to my favorite content. However, I want to buy these games outright so they are available to me even if I decide to let my PlayStation Plus subscription lapse, or downgrade to a lower tier. I’d love to revisit some of my childhood favorites from the PS2 era like Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal or Tony Hawk’s Underground (assuming they’re included in the Premium library of course, no classic games have been confirmed yet). A small selection of classic PlayStation games are currently available to play on PS5/PS4 via PlayStation Now (which is being effectively merged with PlayStation Plus in June), and presumably a bigger catalog will arrive with the Premium tier of the all-new PlayStation Plus, but what I want is the option to purchase these games a la carte.
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