PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium just hit their first anniversary and gave PlayStation players their highly requested version of a Game Pass-like service. It’s been a year of ups and downs, and that milestone makes it worth looking at the two PS Plus services and seeing if they are worth subscribing to now.
Is PS Plus Extra still worth it?
PS Plus Extra launched with a decent library of games, and it’s only gotten better. It came with a suite of first-party titles like Ghost of Tsushima, God of War, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Sony added even more of its own heavy hitters like Returnal, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and Horizon Forbidden West in the months after. Of course, Sony’s games don’t launch on PS Plus, but the wait isn’t too long and many of these games are great enough to outright own.
The third-party games do a fine job of filling out the list, as well. Ubisoft’s beefy lineup has some highlights like Assassin’s Creed Origins, Rayman Legends, Watch Dogs Legion, and Far Cry 4. And these sit alongside titles like Resident Evil 7, Tekken 7, Dishonored 2, Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Doom Eternal, Mortal Kombat 11, Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade that serve as a small sampling of the relatively recent and notable third-party games. There’s a decent variety on display in enough huge franchises that mean most people will either be able to address one of their blind spots or experiment with a well-regarded game in a new genre.
The steady flow of Extra games has only gotten more diverse as time has gone on, which is the true value of Extra. While big AAA games in recognizable franchises are the big tentpole games to sell a subscription service on, the more obscure or unique games are often the most valuable since it’s sometimes difficult to buy into a completely new IP. Games like Thymesia, The Forgotten City, Slay the Spire, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Mortal Shell, Abzu, Blasphemous, Observation, The Gardens Between, and What Remains of Edith Finch fit that description and seeing them pop up on the monthly drop might entice players to give them a go, especially if they have positive word of mouth.
The lineup is generally solid and getting better, but it’s lacking in one area: new releases. Sony has offered a handful of games at launch like Stray, Tchia, and Humanity. And while Stray and Humanity are both great games, three brand-new games in 12 months is just not a great look, especially when compared to Game Pass’ many day-one launches. Catching up on older titles is fine and where PS Plus gets a lot of its value, but having a steady supply of brand-new titles would bring Extra to the next level.
Despite not having many day-one releases, Extra is still a solid deal. It’s got a healthy variety of genres from many types of developers, and seeing the lineup improve over time is promising.
Is PS Plus Premium worth it?
While PS Plus Extra is a decent deal, Premium is a different story. The promise of having a tier dedicated to older games is incredibly smart positioning from Sony since it has a much richer and deeper history in the medium than Xbox. There are simply more PlayStation systems than Xbox and that means it has a unique selling point that Sony can leverage to differentiate Premium from its competition. However, this highest PS Plus tier has struggled to fulfill those ambitions in multiple different ways.
The library is the most striking issue. The PS1 section has classics like Ape Escape and Jumping Flash, but Syphon Filter is a quarter of the first-party offerings. Gabe Logan deserves to be remembered, yet his outsized presence in lieu of other PS1 classics doesn’t bode well for the variety that made the PS1 special. Third-party support is also weak, as there aren’t games like Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, Crash Bandicoot, or many of the other non-Sony games that made the system what it was. There’s only one Resident Evil game and one Tekken, after all. It has only been a year, but the listing presents a severely incomplete picture of the PS1, one that implies that Syphon Filter was the ubiquitous system seller.
The prominence of Syphon Filter carries over to the PSP games, which are also incredibly underwhelming. Super Stardust Portable, Echoshift, and Locoroco Midnight Carnival are just inferior versions of existing games on other PlayStation systems, so there’s little reason to play these handicapped installments. Pursuit Force and Ape Academy 2 are apt examples of PSP games that Sony needs more of since they were unique and pointed out the strengths of the handheld, but these are such a small part of an already-small library.
The PS2 offering is somehow worse since Sony has refused to add any games that weren’t already PS2 on PS4 titles. Because of this frustrating limitation, the PS2 library hasn’t grown at all. Not even every PS2 on PS4 game made the jump, either, so the lineup is not only stagnant, but also short. The PS2 is a beloved console that has many fantastic and varied titles, and Sony has yet to meaningfully convey that through the Premium tier.
The PS3 section is similarly as stunted as the PS2 part of the library since Sony also is reluctant to add new PS3 games to the service that weren’t already on PlayStation Now. It’s boring since it pulls from an established pool and, once again, not a good indicator of the PS3’s library.
Being limited to only streaming is also a sad reality since it works well enough, but it is not a replacement for playing a game locally, something that’s harder to accept when Xbox players mostly don’t have the same restrictions when revisiting games from that era. Merely recycling games from the PlayStation Now (a lot of which are shovelware) and PS2 on PS4 libraries gives the impression that Sony is just half-assing it for these two generations.
Sony has attempted to get around these limitations by putting PS4 versions of games on Premium, but it’s a haphazard approach that doesn’t hide how shoddy this whole tier is. Trying to repackage existing parts of the service like they are new and just putting up old PS4 ports of PS3 games doesn’t cut it. The PS4 version of Limbo should not be in the Premium section, nor should Ghostbusters: The Game Remastered, Patapon Remastered, or any of the numerous remasters that pad out Premium.
These are PS4 games that Sony is trying to artificially shuffle over in a desperate attempt to make Premium seem like anything other than a huge disappointment. It’s even more confusing when some remasters (like the Kingdom Hearts, Skyrim, and Assassin’s Creed remasters) are added to Extra, which makes it all the more frustrating.
Adding trophies to some PS1 and PSP games was just about the only highlight, as Jumping Flash, Locoroco Midnight Carnival, No Heroes Allowed, Echoshift, and Super Stardust Portable all surprisingly got post-release trophy patches. This small change adds an extra incentive for players to check these older titles out and, like the rewind and save state features, is a meaningful way to modernize older titles. It’s annoying that trophy support is inconsistent across the board (and nonexistent for third-party games), but hopefully it becomes more of a standard going forward.
Extra trophies are nice, but they do not save PS Plus Premium because the library for each system is simply insufficient. A new PSP, PS1, PS2, and PS3 game every month would make the added cost more manageable, yet Sony can barely manage one or two “new” games a month and tries to recycle titles from past services or put up PS4 remasters instead. It’s the tier with the most potential, but it is easily the most disappointing and is a poor way to celebrate Sony’s storied history.
