PS Plus Premium has not been very impressive (pic: Sony)
A reader is upset at the state of PS Plus Premium and wishes he’d never signed up to it and its collection of retro PS1, PS2, and PSP games.
As a long-term PlayStation fan, since the very first console, I do feel Sony gets a lot of unnecessary criticism at the moment. Sure, the lack of communication is frustrating, but when they do say something new, or come out with a new game, it’s almost always positive. There may have been very little info on God Of War Ragnarök pre-release but the game itself is amazing, so I’m fine with that.
I’d like to know what other games they have scheduled now but I’m sure we’ll learn that soon enough, probably a couple of them at The Game Awards next month. None of that is important though. It’s not going to speed up the release of anything, whether we know about it in advance or not, and Sony has still had more and better games out this year than Microsoft.
Instead, the one thing that does frustrate me as a PlayStation fan is PS Plus Premium, which is so completely terrible I keep thinking I must’ve missed something. Either that or it’s the world’s least funny troll.
I don’t know how many people actually use PS Plus Premium, since it’s the most expensive of the three PS Plus tiers and apparently Sony has seen 2 million people leave that since they revamped it all. So, I’m guessing maybe not that many? If there were more people that realised how absolutely terrible it is then I think we’d be seeing a lot more outrage right now.
Just to make sure everyone is on the same page, PS Plus Essential is basically the old PS Plus that’s just online multiplayer and a few free games. PS Plus Extra is kind of similar to Game Pass, in that it adds a bunch of PlayStation 4 and 5 games. None of them are day one, like Game Pass, but actually it’s a pretty good deal and I would recommend it. It’s only Premium that’s a problem and which I will not be renewing.
Premium has everything in the lower tiers plus PlayStation 1, 2, 3 and PSP games. I don’t know what happened to PS Vita but as far as I can tell there are no games for it. I say as far as I can tell because the interface for this is absolutely awful and goes to bizarre lengths to stop you from finding the games you’re looking for or grouping them into any kind of sensible order (like by format, for example).
I was hoping to link to a list of all the retro games on Premium but this is the closest there is and, again, it doesn’t separate anything out into formats. So instead, I’ll ask you to take a guess as to how many PS1 games there must be on it, knowing it’s several months after launch and the PS1 is one of the most important and beloved consoles of all time.
Got a number in mind? OK, the answer is… 14. Yes, that’s right fourteen. Including such non-classics as I.Q Intelligent Qube, Toy Story 2, and two Worms games. Only six of them are first party games and the only things close to a classic third party title are Resident Evil Director’s Cut (but not the original) and Tekken 2 (but not the first one).
I’m sure nobody cares that much about the PSP but that’s only got seven games. Just seven! And again, none of the famous ones. The PlayStation 2 fares slightly better, if you want to use that word, with around 25 games but, you guessed it, hardly any good ones.
On PS1 there’s no sign of Gran Turismo or WipEout, which are actual Sony games, or classics like Metal Gear Solid, Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy, Silent Hill, the other Resident Evils, or anything anyone might know or care about.
It’s pathetic. I would genuinely like to hear from anyone that thinks otherwise. Especially, as I say, the service has been running for months now and Sony has never established any pattern for the updates, so we don’t know if there’s supposed to be two new ones a month or whatever.
And remember, PS Plus Premium is more expensive than Extra, so you’re almost literally paying for nothing. If Premium was ever meant to be anything more than this there’s no sign of it, but either way it is the biggest waste of money, and the weirdest failure, PlayStation has ever been involved with.
By reader Hammeriron
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A reader is upset at the state of PS Plus Premium and wishes he’d never signed up to it and its collection of retro PS1, PS2, and PSP games.
