The PSN+ service was revealed at this year’s E3 earlier in the month and is now available to subscribe to. Much like Xbox Live’s gold service it’s a premium subscription based online service that adds bonuses and features over the free service. There are no features removed from the free PSN and put in PSN+ so you can still play online, access the store, send messages to friends and everything else you’ve been able to do with the service. PSN+ does however add quite a lot of perks for subscribers, but are they worth the price?
PSN+ comes in two flavours, £11.99 for 90 days or £39.99 for a year and your PS3 must be updated to the latest firmware 3.40. So what do you get for your money? Well, you get discounts on games and add ons from the PSN store, free and discounted avatars and themes, 1 hour long trails of various full games, early access to some demos and exclusive access to some betas, automatic download and free games. Yes, you can actually get free games with this service. I’d like to see Microsoft offer that with Gold Live membership.
According to Sony the games, avatars, themes and discounts offered with PSN+ amount to at least £200 per year so at even at £39.99 the service is some great value for money not counting the other features like Automatic Download and Full Game Trials.
The Automatic Download feature will turn your PS3 on whenever there is an system update or an update to a game you own and download and install the update. You can even set it to automatically download game demos, all you do is set the time you want it to automatically check for downloads and it’ll turn on and download. This seems like a feature that could have been offered for free in a system update and really doesn’t seem like much. It’s nice though if you download a lot as you can have it set to update while you are at work or something.
The Full Game Trails are just one hour trails. You have full access to the game, just like if you bought it, for one hour. It’s a nice feature and a good way to demo games. Trophies you’ve earned and progress you’ve made will be unlocked once you buy the game so you can pick up right where you left off. This is a pretty nice feature but so far, for the first month, it’s only available on two games. I can see this feature being used a lot and perhaps the second biggest draw of PSN+ if they can offer this feature on most PSN/mini games and on a lot more Blu-ray releases.
The biggest draw of PSN+ in my opinion is the free games. While not technically free as you only have access to the games as long as you are a subscriber (something I didn’t know until after I bought my 90 day subscription and played a hefty amount of Age of Zombies) this is still great value. If you purchase the yearlong PSN+ subscription option before the 3rd of August you’ll get Little Big Planet for download for free. There will be new games given away every month so there’s an incentive to stay subscribed and to keep you checking the PSN store.
It’s not only games given away for free, you can also get free dynamic themes, avatars and game expansions. These will also cycle so there’s plenty of free content every month with PSN+. There’s also the discounts to games and expansions which are nice but don’t seem to be very big discounts. At least not going by this month’s deals.
All in all PSN+ seems to be worth the money purely for the free games. It costs around the price of Xbox Live Gold for a year and while the biggest thing about XBL gold is the ability to play online (free on PSN) the biggest thing for PSN+ seems to be free games, and I’d much rather pay a fixed price to get a bunch of games a year rather than to play online.
Content for Month 1 of PSN+:
Games
LittleBigPlanet (only available until 3 August 2010) FREE with 1 year subscription
WipEout HD FREE
Field Runners (minis) FREE
Age of Zombies (minis) FREE
Destruction Derby (PS one Classic) FREE
Full Game Trials
Shatter
Savage Moon
Special Offers
LittleBigPlanet: God of War Pack – 50% off (£1.20 from £2.39)
LittleBigPlanet: LocoRoco costume pack – 50% off (£1.20 from £2.39)
Gravity Crash – 20% off (£5.03 from £6.29)
Fat Princess Fat Roles DLC – 20% off (£3.19 from £3.99)
Premium Game Downloads
KillZone 2: Steel & Titanium map pack FREE
Automatic Download Demos
ModNation Racers demo
Heavy Rain demo
Dynamic Themes and Premium Avatars
LittleBigPlanet Dynamic Theme FREE
Game Is Just The Start Dynamic Theme FREE
Fat Princess Premium Avatars FREE
For more information visit http://uk.playstation.com/playstationplus/
