When Sony announced its Playstation Plus subscription service back
in 2010, I was pretty sceptical from the word go. I just couldn't see why
anybody would be prepared to pay a subscription equal to the cost of Xbox Live
when the Playstation Network already offers online play for free as standard
(for now at least). Because of all of these reasons, I wasn't too drawn to
trying it out the service at first and haven't been until I decided to sign up the other day.
I can't stop
writing posts about Playstation at the moment it seems (minus this post about Nintendo the other day in which I mentioned the Playstation a number of times - doh!), but
oh well, my 360 is going to get plenty of love when The Witcher 2 comes out for
it soon.
So anyway, here's why Sony snagged more of my money this
month:
The reason I
signed up to Playstation Plus is pretty much the same reason I sign up to any
subscription; the promise of FREE STUFF NOW. The appeal of this one was simple
- a game I really wanted to try out last year, Need for Speed: Shift 2:
Unleashed (double colon!), was available free to PS Plus subscribers. So it's
£19.99 to download without PS Plus, and free if I take out a 3 month
subscription for £11.99? Even I can do the math there. Now, I haven't played
NFS Shift 2 yet, so I'm not going to talk about the game itself, but more about
how bloody impressed I am with the Playstation Plus service so far.
For what
essentially feels like free (or even being eight quid up, although the age of
the game means it's probably not gonna be £20 in shops) you get a whole host of
extra free shit and further discounts, including PSN games, exclusive content
(all cosmetic stuff like themes/avatars, but still, FREE!), plus the cloud saving feature and auto game patching. Everything on offer is far from essential,
which I guess is a good thing in that nobody's losing out too much by not
upgrading, but it does feel like exactly what the name implies - i.e.
Playstation with extras. NFS Shift 2 is over a year old now so it's hardly
something completely shiny and new, but if Sony keep offering up quality,
slightly older games for free to me every month or so then I'll probably keep
the subscription beyond my first three months just to give me an incentive to
try them out all the games I had on my maybe pile on the pretence that they're special goodies.
Going back to the
Xbox Live comparison, I finally now get Playstation Plus as a product. Xbox
Live is pretty much an essential for a hardcore gamer, in that if you want to
play online you have to have it. They even require it to use bloody Facebook,
which is flat out ridiculous. In a way it's clever from Microsoft in that it's
a steady revenue stream that will keep people using the console, even if only to
extract maximum value from their subscription, but so far I like
Playstation Plus better. It feels like you're getting a premium service that
rewards you for subscribing to it, rather than inhibiting you if you don't.
Sony are far from
perfect angels in terms of the relationships they hold with their customers
(see here & here), but I'm all about giving credit where credit's due, and Sony do
deserve it for the Playstation Plus service. If there was one negative
observation I could make against it (and I'm a cynic, so there always is) it
would be that the auto patching service, which downloads new game updates
overnight for you, should be available to all users given what a pain in the
arse updating games on the PS3 is. Still, I recommend anybody try Playstation
Plus out... now let's hope NFS Shift 2 is worth more than the nothing I
technically paid for it.
