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Speaker 1: Sony used to have two different subscription services for the PlayStation. Now it just has one, but that one has three different tiers or three different prizes. So yes, still kind of confusing. That’s okay. We’re gonna go over PlayStation plus the new PlayStation plus and see which one of these tiers that you, if you happen to have a PlayStation five or even a PlayStation four should probably be subscribing to
Speaker 1: [00:00:30] A problem started many years ago when Sony with the PlayStation and Microsoft with the Xbox, they realized that once you bought the console, if you weren’t buying games on a regular basis, that was kind of it as far as your commercial relationship with the company went. So they said we need some recurring subscription revenue. So let’s take some stuff that people really need and kind of hide it behind a paywall. And the main thing they did behind the paywall initially was online multiplayer gaming. So if you wanted to play call of duty with other people [00:01:00] online, you had to subscribe to Xbox live or, you know, the PlayStation equivalent of that, which was PlayStation plus. And that gave you that online access over time. Both of these companies really sweeten the pop by adding more and more stuff to their subscription services right now, Xbox game pass is what they call the service that has the online gameplay, the big catalog of games, a couple of extra free games per month, and a few other things now, Sony, during this time has had PlayStation plus, which also gave you [00:01:30] a couple of free games to add to your catalog every month.
Speaker 1: And you would keep access to those games as long as you were a paying subscriber and the online gameplay and discounts and a few other things. But then they also had PlayStation now, which was a cloud based subscription service. That was a totally separate subscription you had to pay for. And that gave you access to mostly older games that would cloud stream, frankly, their cloud streaming has never been that great because it’s based on some older technology from a company they bought years ago. That’s a whole other story, but it was still confusing. [00:02:00] Which one do I want plus now, do I get ’em both. Do I get a discount? If I subscribe to both? The answer was always no. Well now Sony has gotten rid of now. They basically folded it into the new PlayStation plus, but PlayStation plus now has three different tiers.
Speaker 1: There’s the essential, the extra and the premium. Now just again, out of the way, essential is 10 bucks a month. Extra is 15 and premium is 18. And there are discounts. If you get, you know, a full year subscription now, what do you get for each one? [00:02:30] This is where we gotta dive into the details a little bit. I’m gonna actually pop over here to PlayStation plus, and I’m gonna go down and see what all the benefits are. I’m gonna scroll all the way over to start. Let’s go over to essential the real stuff to keep in mind for essential. And each tier up includes that stuff. Plus the stuff from the tiers before, obviously cloud storage. That’s really big. If you have a PlayStation at home and wanting another room or one at work, maybe like I do, whichever it is, if you wanna share your saves via the cloud.
Speaker 1: So you can log [00:03:00] in from another system you need cloud storage. Xbox is something similar, frankly, on the PC side, steam does that for free. They don’t charge anything extra for that or for multiplayer gaming. The next most important thing is online multiplayer. Obviously that’s a big part of gaming these days. And most of the time you need this, uh, in order to do any kind of competitive or multiplayer online gaming, there are a few exceptions like on the Xbox. Now you can play free to play games online without being a subscriber like Fortnite. Uh, but that’s the exception rather than the rule, [00:03:30] uh, some exclusive stuff add-ons for games. I’m never that excited about that discount. If you buy stuff directly from their online store, Xbox offers something similar, uh, monthly games. That’s really the key other feature of the essential pack. And that goes back to the original PlayStation.
Speaker 1: Plus they pick like two, maybe three games a month. And if you get to them during that month, you can add ’em to your catalog. If you missed them, you missed them. But if you add ’em to your catalog, they stay there again. As long as you’re paying subscriber, if you leave the program, you don’t [00:04:00] have access to those games anymore. Sometimes it’s really good ones. Sometimes it’s kinda lame once. Now, if you have a PlayStation five, even as part of the essential subscription, you do get this PlayStation plus collection, which is actually pretty neat. It’s like their mini version of Xbox game pass before they had the bigger version that they had now. And I’m gonna just pop into it and show you kind of what’s in here. And this is only on PS five, and it’s a pretty nice collection. You got, uh, the most recent God of war game fallout.
Speaker 1: Four is always fun. [00:04:30] Uh, I love stuff like Detroit, uh, become human, a nice little collection there. Uh, not something I would pay a tremendous amount of extra money for, but it’s included even in the $10 a month version. So that’s the essential, that’s 10 bucks a month. And if you were a traditional PlayStation plus subscriber, and you just wanna keep the same level of service, that’s basically what this is. Now. They really want you to trade up to the extra level of service, which is the closest analogy to Xbox game pass, regular Xbox game pass that’s [00:05:00] because once you move up to extra, you get the game catalog, which again, like Xbox game pass is a big catalog of games. I think there’s almost 400 games in there now that you can download and play on your PS4 or your PS five. And there’s some good stuff in there.
Speaker 1: Uh, there’s a lot of old stuff in there. Unlike Xbox game pass. It’s less about brand new games on day one. So if I go into that catalog right now, you can see that you get stuff like Spider-Man miles Morales. That was a PS five [00:05:30] launch game. That’s pretty cool. If you have a PS pride, you probably have that already. The latest assassins creed game, the remake of demon souls, ghost of tu Shima, red dead redemption guardians of the galaxy. That was my pick for game of the year for 2021, just because the voice acting and the narrative and the scripting is so good. So, you know, a lot of cool stuff after this, it kind of settles down a little bit and you’re getting, uh, you know, older games shadow of the Colossus, a little big planet. So the further down you go, you know, [00:06:00] less exciting stuff.
Speaker 1: So if you have some holes in your gaming education or gaming history, you want to fill, you can go through here and actually find a lot of really interesting stuff, but probably 75% of it, you may never be interested in now for your $15 a month, you get ongoing access to this catalog and much like Xbox game. Passon says they’ll be adding new games to it on a regular basis. And frankly, some games can probably disappear from it after let’s say a licensing agreement expires. So if something’s in here, it does not mean it will always be in here. So the game catalog [00:06:30] is really the only extra thing you get with the extra tier, but it’s such a big part of it that I think it’s definitely worth it. If you move up from extra to premium, that goes from $15 a month to $18 a month, and you do get some interesting bonus stuff with that.
Speaker 1: I’m not sure if it’s enough to make you pay the extra every month for it. That’s really up to you to decide, but I’m gonna show you what it is. And you can figure out if this kind of stuff is up your alley. So number one, cloud streaming, obviously cloud streaming is very big in gaming right now. If you have your PlayStation [00:07:00] sitting right here, you frankly don’t need to do a lot of game streaming. You can just download games, but it’s nice that some PS, five games, some PS, four games, some earlier games, you can actually do streaming versions of, uh, there’s also some PC game access. If you install a special Sony app on your windows machine, that’s a whole nother issue to go into. And maybe we’ll circle back on that one later, the classics catalog. Now this is separate from the regular PS four and PS five game catalog.
Speaker 1: This is actually older games, PlayStation one games, PlayStation two games. So it’s part of the classics [00:07:30] collection. Yeah. Cool stuff like the last of us remastered some uncharted games, uh, the original resident evil. I think this might be the director’s cut of that. If you go down a little bit further ape escape. Okay. Uh, some Atari flashback classics, uh, but a lot of the stuff are games that you’ve had access to on other platforms or in other ways for a long time, this is not the only way to play Biona commando or ACA asylum that said I did start going through here and say, oh, I want to look at that again. I wanna look at this again, [00:08:00] but I’d probably spend like five minutes with each of these games. Now, the other feature you get with premium is something. Sony is calling game trials.
Speaker 1: It’s kind of like a demo for a game. I believe it’s the full game, but it’s a time limited demo. And the time is different depending on which game you’re demoing. Sometimes it’s an hour. Maybe it’s four hours after that. You have to buy the game. If you wanna keep going, or you can just say, okay, play the demo. And that’s enough. There’s only a handful of games in this timed trial demo section right now. [00:08:30] A couple of them seem like the kind of thing you’d want to demo. Maybe, uh, the new horizon game forbidden west tiny teen is wonderlands. That looks cool. Uh, other than that, you know, cyber punk is already kind of old, old uncharted games. I don’t know if anybody really needs to play a demo of bio mutant, but you can see that’s the entire demo section as of right now.
Speaker 1: But I would be very interested in seeing this expand and getting more games in that. So that’s kind of the differences between the three versions of PlayStation. Plus you got the essential, you got the extra [00:09:00] and you got the premium. Now essential is kind of ground stakes, 10 bucks a month. Online gaming cloud saves and a couple of free games. Again, if you were a PlayStation plus subscriber and you were happy with that, you didn’t want anything else that continues as is obviously the extra tier that middle tier $15 a month is the middle ground. That most people are gonna land on. You get more recent games in that catalog, including some really good stuff. You get a few other benefits. However, if you’re a classic game player and you’re really like, [00:09:30] uh, deep diving into old PS, one games, PS, two games, there’s even PSP games.
Speaker 1: Then there’s the premium tier. That’s the main reason you’d want to do that. Maybe the cloud streaming, if you like that, I do like cloud streaming on console sometimes because you don’t have to wait for a whole game to download, to try it. You can just play it via the cloud or whatever, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And if you think it’s really good, then you go and download it. Uh, but you don’t necessarily have to do that first. It’s almost like an instant gratification thing. If you are an average [00:10:00] everyday PlayStation gamer, like I am like many people are, you’re probably gonna end up in that middle, extra tier. That’s the one that I’m gonna recommend to you. But if you want to trade up, uh, there’s some extra stuff there and, uh, you can always do it for a month or two. Look through the catalog, see if there’s anything you really like. And if there’s not, you can go back down to extra or even down to essential if that suits your needs better. So I hope that’s clarified some of the confusion about the three different tiers of PlayStation plus and how they replace the old PlayStation plus and PlayStation now, which has been folded [00:10:30] in. Maybe the landscape is just a little bit clearer now.
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