Editorials

Is PS Plus still great value?

September 3, 2014, Author: Andy Buick

Sony’s star seems to be rising inexorably at the moment. The PlayStation 4 has blasted out of the blocks so quickly it’s surprised even Sony executives themselves, by selling more than 10 million units within nine months. This success, while in part no doubt creditable to some horrendous PR errors by Microsoft and Sony themselves being much more straightforward in their approach, undoubtedly owes a lot to Sony’s banner online service PS Plus.

In the couple of years running up to the release of the PS4, your £40 annual fee (or less if you’ve taken advantage of many deals that have sprung up) netted you an absolute barrage of quality games each month. I joined in September 2012, no longer able to ignore what I was missing as Red Dead Redemption was offered. This was subsequently followed by the likes of Bulletstorm, Batman: Arkham City, Mass Effect 3, Demon’s Souls, and more and more just on PS3.

On PS Vita, if you’ve been a member since the start, it’s almost given you every essential title for the handheld, including Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Gravity Rush, Lumines: Electronic Symphony, Everybody’s Golf, Virtue’s Last Reward, Soul Sacrifice and some truly great indie titles such as Thomas Was Alone.

Arkham City was one of the standout games of the PS3 generation, and was all yours in PS Plus

Arkham City was one of the standout games of the PS3 generation, and was all yours in PS Plus

If that wasn’t enough already, Sony announced PS Plus would be active on PS4 from the very beginning, the only downside now being that it’s a necessity if you want to play any games online. That wouldn’t matter right? With such a plethora of great games each month you’d have to be mad not to subscribe.

Yet here we are, nine months after the release of the PS4, and the Internet, home to well-adjusted people in every corner, seems to have an increasing volume of commentators unhappy with what’s being offered.

So what do you actually get at the moment? Of course this depends on which Sony consoles you own. If, like me, you own the PS4, PS3 and Vita, you get a whopping six titles a month, two on each platform; generally with at least one or two titles available as crossbuy making
it look even more attractive.

Some of the platforming's a bit pants but Stick It To The Man is an absolute gem that I wouldn't have played without PS Plus

Some of the platforming’s a bit pants but Stick It To The Man is an absolute gem that I wouldn’t have played without PS Plus.

Given the disparity between PS4 and Xbox One sales right now though, it seems clear that a number of Xbox 360 owners have jumped ship this generation and so possibly only have a PS4. That still means two games a month, 24 a year, or to put it in British monetary terms, £1.67 per title.

At £1.67 a title, or just 56p (56!), if you own all consoles, surely there can be nothing to complain about, can there? Yet there is increasing discontent with what’s been offered during 2014, particularly on PS4. Nearly every title on the service so far for the new console has been an indie, and beyond that, what seems to have irked many people is that some of these are re-released PS3 titles (Dead Nation, Trine 2, Stick It To The Man, Pixeljunk Shooter), some have been out on PC for a long while (Outlast, Mercenary Kings). There have been no AAA titles at all so far.

This view on Indies seems to be that the games are either uninteresting, or because they’re by small studios have a perceived lack of quality because they might have retro graphics (Towerfall Ascension, Fez), or do things a little different to your average AAA (Don’t Starve, Road Not Taken).

Towerfall Ascension may not look like much but get a few mates round and it's utterly brilliant

Towerfall Ascension may not look like much but get a few mates round and it’s utterly brilliant

I’ll be honest, to an extent I have myself looked at the latest lists on occasion and thought, “Meh”, but each month I’ve tried these PS4 titles out and for the most part I’ve thoroughly enjoyed what I’ve played.

Stick It To The Man, Resogun and Fez are all outstanding games. Let’s not forget that Eurogamer liked Fez so much they made it their 2012 game of the year. Okay, that does make it a couple of years old, but this is its first appearance on Sony consoles, and you get it on all three…

There have only been a couple I’ve not gotten on so well with. Don’t Starve didn’t really work for me, and I’m far too big a wuss to finish Outlast. With such a value service though, I can live with the odd miss and I know plenty of people who have greatly enjoyed both of those titles so I know it’s not a quality issue.

I’ve also seen mention of the promised 70 average score minimum on Metacritic, and while I admit I thought perhaps one or two of the PS4 releases might have fallen below that, actually none of them have. In fact it’s only really on Vita where Sony has failed to live up to the promise. Sadly that is probably more a reflection of the lack of support for the handheld in recent times than anything else.

On the face of it then, really, there is no cause for complaint. Yet the update for September seems to have caused more comment than ever. On PS4 we will be getting Velocity 2X (crossbuy with PS Vita) and Sportsfriends; on PS3 we get PS All-Stars Battle Royale (crossbuy with PS Vita) and Hoard; and finally on Vita, as well as the two crossbuy titles, we get Joe Danger and TxK.

Can Velocity 2X fill the AAA void on PS4? Velocity Ultra suggests it can

Can Velocity 2X fill the AAA void on PS4? Velocity Ultra suggests it can

It’s not what I would call a banner month, but Velocity Ultra was a very well received game and Velocity 2X looks set to continue, if not improve, on that. Sportsfriends is meant to be great fun, the only downside being it really requires mates in your home to get the most out of it. TxK is also meant to be very good, and having played Joe Danger extensively on PS3, I can vouch for that if you’ve not tried it.

It’s actually on PS3 this month where there’s some disappointment, at least for me. I took part in the beta for PS All-Stars, and while I thought it was okay, it is not the Smash Bros rival it was intended to be and frankly, the beta was enough. Hoard I can’t actually comment on as I’d never heard of it, but it turns out it’s a strategy game from 2010. If a criticism can be levelled then, it’s perhaps the lack of AAA in there, and that the one AAA title in there isn’t so good.

Is this a sign of a downward trend in quality, or value then? The first answer to this is that value and quality are to some extent at least in the eye of the beholder. For me personally, this month doesn’t present as much quality or value as other months, but taken across a year’s subscription, while I am a little disappointed, I have absolutely no complaints whatsoever.

Looking more specifically at the trending side of things, Sony has already stated that Driveclub will arrive on PS Plus when it’s released, and barring any further release date slips that will be in October, so we finally have our first AAA title, albeit it in a reduced format that, incidentally I hope is not the beginning of another trend. Then November heralds the first year anniversary of the PS4 so it seems highly likely there’ll be some form of celebration and I would expect to see at least one more AAA title then.

Driveclub finally makes its way to PS4, and PS Plus next month, disappointingly in rather reduced form

Driveclub finally makes its way to PS4, and PS Plus next month, disappointingly in rather reduced form

From that point on I expect to see an ongoing balance of AAA and indie for PS4. We all need to understand that the bigger titles were never likely to make it onto PS Plus to start with simply because there are few of them, and early adopters would generally be expected to go out and buy these games anyway. If anything, perhaps we should be grateful that the rush of indie releases has made PS Plus a viable proposition on PS4 right from the off.

Plus or Minus?

I can understand subscribers being disappointed when a month comes round that contains few games they’re really interested in, but talk of unsubscribing, or of PS Plus being poor value, is a little ridiculous when the sheer value in terms of bang for your buck is beyond doubt. Sony have an enormous install base to please, and they’re never going to tick the boxes for all of them in any given month irrespective of what they offer.

Of course, if all these gamers are interested in is AAA titles such as CoD or FIFA, chances are that disappointment will remain as these titles rarely, if ever, appear on the service simply because they don’t need that extra boost, they already sell more than well enough.

Giving up on PS Plus now though just doesn’t make sense. See what the next few months hold; I’m confident a resurgence is on the way.