PlayStation Plus: A Retrospective Look | Game Rant
When PS Plus first launched for PS3 a few weeks after Sony’s E3 2010 press conference, it was obvious that Sony’s newest service at the time was intended to make the PS3 more competitive with the Xbox 360 and its famed Xbox Live online service.
Sony initially touted the service as able to give consumers everything its competition can and more. Over the years, PS Plus changed drastically as a service, gaining more than 38 million users in the process,and will most likely continue to do so into the launch of the PS5.
Whereas Xbox Live only gave its subscribers store discounts and occasional access to game betas, PS Plus was supposed to give its own subscribers those features, along with a monthly rolling catalog of games available for users to download and play at no additional cost.
For Sony to start this premium monthly service at that time, there was a clear attempt from the console company to get out ahead of its competition between Microsoft’s much more popular Xbox 360 (at least in North America) and the Nintendo Wii which ran away with the lead much earlier on in the generation. This was one of those moves that a console company makes when it is on the back foot and is trying to come out on top. It was just one of Sony’s attempts to do so in 2010.
Nowadays, Microsoft is the company trying to get back on top and it has been making serious moves to do so, like the surprise 2015 announcement that backwards compatibility would be coming to the Xbox One or its continued dedication to Xbox Game Pass, a service that has been unbelievably inexpensive at times that people started to question whether or not Microsoft was wasting money on it. Xbox also has Games With Gold now, the equivalent to PS Plus. When these companies make these seemingly extreme decisions, it is all in the service of winning back or gaining new consumers.
The amount of games that Sony made available for PS Plus throughout the years lends credence to the idea that it wanted to make the PS3 (and subsequently the PS4) as enticing to consumers as possible. For several years, it succeeded in doing this as it managed to put out hit games on the service that were released sometimes just a year before. In its early years, it relied on smaller games like Cuboid and Plants vs Zombies to be the featured monthly titles and Sony would also stack each month’s catalog with some PSP and downloadable PS1 classic games as well (making the average number of games coming to the service about four to six monthly).
The service’s monthly game selection did not hit its stride until around 2012 when it started to feature blockbuster games like Deus Ex Human Revolution, Red Dead Redemption, and the like. The combination of big games and small games somewhat led to a cycle where fans would skip certain games at launch, instead waiting for it to come to PS Plus. Sony still does the big game, small game routine with PS Plus to this day. The most recent titles that came to PS Plus for January 2020, for example, were Uncharted The Nathan Drake Collection and Goat Simulator.
A few months after the launch of the PS4, Sony began to bring PS4 games to the service which led to an upswing in each game’s player count. Due to the PS4 requiring PS Plus in order to play multiplayer online (much like Xbox Live), many more new users began to subscribe to the service, which in turn exposed them to these monthly games. Some games exploded in popularity because of this, such as Rocket League.
When Rocket League launched in July of 2015, developer Psyonix also launched the game simultaneously on PS Plus, allowing for potentially millions of more users to experience the game than through a normal launch. It ended up being an enormous success for the studio and Psyonix’s newfound popularity made it a good candidate to be eventually bought out by Epic Games in 2019. This doesn’t really happen for games on PS Plus anymore.
At the beginning of 2019, Sony made the decision to only release two PS4 games a month onto the service, cutting off its supply of PS3 and Vita games. It also started to put on games that were several years old at that point and could be purchased for dollars elsewhere. The only real exception to this was July 2019 when Detroit Become Human, a game that was released only a year earlier, was made available. Since then ,newer games have been far and few between. The aforementioned January 2020 downloadable titles are both from 2015 which could be an indicator for how Sony is planning to stack up this year’s PS Plus catalog.
As for how Sony will utilize PS Plus for the months after the launch of the PS5 later this year, only time will tell.
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