Time To Cancel PlayStation Plus As Sony Quietly Raises Prices Through The Roof
PS Plus is getting a massive subscription price increase.
Credit: SonyPlayStation Plus is getting a pretty significant price hike with very little warning to consumers.
Tucked away in the announcement for next month’s PS Plus Essential games lineup, Sony dropped the news:
We also wanted to let you know that starting September 6 we will be increasing the price for PlayStation Plus 12-month subscriptions globally across all benefit plans. This price adjustment will enable us to continue bringing high-quality games and value-added benefits to your PlayStation Plus subscription service.
The price increase is significant for anyone who subscribes on a yearly basis. PS Plus Essential will cost $20 more per year. PS Plus Extra, which gets you a bunch of extra games from the PS4 and PS5 era, will be $35 more per year and PS Plus Premium, which gives you both the previous tiers plus access to a retro game catalogue, will cost $40 more per year.
The current prices are:
- PS Plus Essential — $59.99 / year
- PS Plus Extra — $99.99 / year
- PS Plus Premium — $119.99 / year
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On September 6th, these prices increase by a truly staggering amount:
- PS Plus Essential — $79.99 / year
- PS Plus Extra — $134.99 / year
- PS Plus Premium — $159.99 / year
To be fair, these are still cheaper than the $16.99/month you’d pay for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, though that comes with access to both Xbox and PC Game Pass. That equates to $203.88/year, but also includes all first-party Microsoft exclusives, including Starfield which launches today.
Normal Game Pass is $10.99/year and only covers Xbox (you can also get PC Game Pass if you’re on PC and not Xbox) which runs you about the same as PS Plus Extra’s new pricing tier. But again, you get games like Starfield for free with that subscription, whereas AAA Sony games won’t come to PS Plus for a long time (months to years—or never—depending). Sony has more exclusives, but PlayStation Plus simply doesn’t give you access to those in the same way as Game Pass.
For my part, I have to question whether continuing to subscribe to PlayStation Plus actually makes sense. I do most of my online gaming on PC. When I play online games with my kids and my friends, it’s all PC or Xbox. Most of the games I love to play on PlayStation are single-player like Marvel’s Spider-Man, which won’t come to PS Plus at release anyways. Is it worth spending this much on a service I rarely use? These price hikes certainly make me question the point in renewing my subscription, especially in a subscription-based economy that starts to really add up (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Spotify, and the list goes on and on).
I understand that this is probably the only choice Sony had to make. Things are changing rapidly in the streaming and subscription models. The promise of cheap, easily accessible content that just keeps coming out of the spigot was always too good to be true. You pay for what you get. And sometimes you have to decide if what you’re paying for is really worth it.
What do you think? Does this make you question your PS Plus subscription? How many subscriptions are sustainable and what kind of value does each one need to bring to the table? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.
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