When I bought my ps vita, it came with a voucher for a one year subscription of playstation plus (ps+), valuing 50€. At first I tough that it was another crappy marketing maneuver made by Sony. I couldn’t be more mistaken. The marketing is surely there. They wave at you with the “instant Game Collection”, “Additional discounts on sales” and Special discounts only available for ps+ subscribers. If you buy the service, it costs you 50€ (maybe less if buy/renovate it in Christmas time), in return you get all the mention above.
But what each of those items means.
“Instant Game Collection” – this translates to 3 free games for your ps3 and 2 free games for your ps vita. this games are yours to play as long as your subscription is active, even after they are replaced by other 3+2 games twelve months later. This games are usually reference games for each console. Last year games where: Little Big Planet 2 (ps3), Infamous 2 (ps3) and MotorStorm Apocalypse (ps3), Uncharted Golden Abyss (ps vita) and Gravity Rush (ps vita). While the vita games are still up, in the middle of June the ps3 titles where replaced (for a period of twelve months) by Uncharted 3: Drakes Fortune, Xcom: Enemy Unknown and Little Big Planet Karting.
This 5 games alone more than worth the 50€/year you have to pay. However, every month, and for a 30 days period, 5 more games enter the roaster.
Just to give you an idea, here is the list for June, July and August 2013
July: Battlefield 3 (ps3), Payday: The Heist (ps3), Saints Row the Third (ps3), Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus (ps vita) and Unit 13 (ps vita) (and a big rip-off)
These 3 months alone go well over 100€, no imagine this for 12 months… But before you go running to your local store to buy this or quickly login in your psn account to buy a subscription, there are some cons on this service.
The biggest one is for people that like to run homebrews on their consoles. Ps+ forces you to update to the latest version in order to access psn and there for to be able to download your “free” games.
One other issue is that you depend exclusively from want Sony thinks you want to play. For instance, this month the list for ps3 has nothing for me since I mainly enjoy RPG, however, June was AWESOME because of Kingdoms of Amalur. This means that sometimes we can ended up playing games you would never buy.
The third issue relates with a vita problem (don’t miss my article “Is the Ps Vita the new n-gage” to be publish soon already publish, just follow the link). Sometimes there will be a psp game slipped away between a monthly update branded as a ps vita game. This problem mainly affects North America and is accompanied by a lot of flaming in the official blog and forums.
However, if you don’t care about running homebrews on your console, don’t care about being force to update and specially, don’t want to spend a fortune in games, this service is for you.
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Cheers
Francisco
