PlayStation Plus Is About To Get A Lot More Expensive

Key art shows a bunch of popular PlayStation exclusives.

Image: Sony

PlayStation Plus is about to get a lot more expensive. Sony announced that, beginning in September, the annual subscription price will go from $60 up to $80 for the lowest tier of the program. Meanwhile PS Plus Premium, which competes directly with Game Pass by offering a big Netflix-style library of games and cloud streaming, will jump from $120 all the way up to $160.

Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger

Sony buried the news at the bottom of a new PlayStation Blog post sharing the PS Plus games getting added for September, which includes 2022’s Saints Row reboot. “We also wanted to let you know that starting September 6 we will be increasing the price for PlayStation Plus 12-month subscriptions globally across all benefit plans,” the company wrote. “This price adjustment will enable us to continue bringing high-quality games and value-added benefits to your PlayStation Plus subscription service.”

Here’s the breakdown of the price increases:

PS Plus Essential

Old Yearly Price: $60

New Yearly Price: $80

PS Plus Extra

Old Yearly Price: $100

New Yearly Price: $135

PS Plus Premium

Old Yearly Price: $120

New Yearly Price: $160

These changes won’t impact current subscribers until their renewal date and don’t apply to the pay-as-you-go monthly prices or 3-month price. The annual subscriptions will still be cheaper than the monthly ones, but less so. Previously, you could save a whopping $96 off the sticker price by getting a whole year of PS Plus Premium. Now it’s only $56.

The move comes shortly after Microsoft jacked up the prices on Game Pass from $15 a month to $17 (there’s no annual discount). Even with the PS Plus rate change, a year of Premium is still $44 cheaper than a year of Game Pass. While both services offer many of the same features, one of the defining differences remains Microsoft’s committment to putting its big first-party exclusives on the service day-and-date.

The most notable one of those will be Starfield which arrives on September 6, or five days early for Game Pass subscribers who spend $30 to upgrade to the game’s Premium Edition. Sony has previously stated that doing the same with blockbusters like Spider-Man 2 would be financially unsustainable, and force it to cut the costs and potential quality of its acclaimed first-party games.

         

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Sega Just Canceled Its Most Expensive Game Ever

A new report claims that Sega’s recently canceled online extraction shooter, Hyenas, was the publisher’s most expensive game production ever, beating out even Sega AM2’s historically pricey adventure game Shenmue, which famously cost $70 million in turn-of-the-century dollars to develop.

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Announced in June 2022, Hyenas was being developed by Total War and Alien: Isolation dev Creative Assembly. It was described as a “sci-fi space piracy multiplayer FPS” pitting teams of players against both each other and NPCs as they fought to steal valuable items and pieces of pop culture. On September 28—just 17 days after the most recent Hyenas beta—Sega canceled the shooter before its official launch. According to developers who worked on the ill-fated project, Hyenas was the single most expensive video game Sega’s ever made.

In an October 4 report from VGC, backed up by a YouTuber with inside knowledge of Creative Assembly, developers explained that the reason the upcoming shooter was canned came down to a lack of direction and an engine change midway through development that caused a lot of headaches.

Sega

One anonymous developer, when asked what went wrong, cited multiple reasons, including a “total lack of direction” and leadership that was “asleep at the wheel.” That same dev also claimed an engine change “part way through the process” didn’t help the team working on the game. According to the report, Hyenas was greenlit in an effort by Creative Assembly’s management to create a console shooter with broad appeal. Reportedly the studio management directly named Destiny and PUBG as inspiration.

Kotaku has contacted Sega for more information.

It’s believed that Hyenas was an example of one of Sega’s so-called “Super Games” and had a budget to match, with a developer who worked on the game telling VGC it was Sega’s “biggest budget game ever.”

“Towards the end, there were people from Sega Japan more or less permanently at the UK office,” claimed the anonymous developer. “This has never happened the whole time I’ve worked at CA. They occasionally came to visit and check how a game was looking but as I said previously, generally hands-off.”

While Hyenas was originally planned to be released as a premium title, before it was killed it had become a free-to-play shooter. However, after multiple online closed beta tests for the game, sources speaking to VGC claim that Sega wasn’t happy with the expensive shooter’s progress and that led to its cancellation in late September.

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Sony Adds Free Movies To Most Expensive PlayStation Plus Tiers

An image shows the Sony Pictures Core app on a flatscreen television placed next to a PlayStation 5.

Image: Sony

Today, Sony announced a new app coming to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles that’ll offer PlayStation Plus Premium and Deluxe members access to a bunch of Sony Pictures Entertainment films.

Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger

Sony Pictures Core, a rebrand of Sony’s streaming service Bravia Core, will let PlayStation users purchase or rent up to 2,000 Sony films “straight from your console.” The offerings include big-name titles like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Uncharted, Bullet Train, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife. You can download the Sony Pictures Core app in the Media section of the PS Store on your console. And depending on your Playstation Plus subscription tier, a select assortment of those may be available to you for free.

According to the PlayStation blog post, PS Plus Premium and Deluxe subscribers will receive the added bonus of an ad-free, curated list of 100 films like Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV and Resident Evil Damnation, which will be updated “periodically” to stream as part of your membership. Sony also announced that Sony Pictures Core will have an “early access” window where folks can purchase films like Gran Turismo, the app’s first exclusive movie, before they become available on any other on-demand home video service.

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Toward the end of the blog post, Sony teased “additional benefits” to come for PlayStation Plus members in the future, saying:

We hope you’ll enjoy Sony Pictures Core and all the films that will be accessible through the app. It’s part of our shared goal with Sony Pictures Entertainment to bring together this curated collection of wonderful films to elevate the PlayStation experience. This is just the beginning, and we plan to evolve the offerings and benefits of Sony Pictures Core over time—including a selection of hit anime content from Crunchyroll. We’re looking forward to more exciting things to come, so stay tuned!

The app is available today. Bravia Core will officially rebrand as Sony Pictures Core next year.

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PS5 Digital Is About To Get $50 More Expensive

A PS5 sits in front of a PlayStation background.

Image: Sony / Kotaku

Sony revealed the long-rumored “slim” models for the PlayStation 5, and while they are a lot lighter than the existing consoles, the specs haven’t really changed. What has changed is the price, however. The company announced the new all-digital PS5 will be priced at $450 instead of $400.

Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger

The new “slim” PS5 with a detachable disc drive will remain $500, the same as the launch model. But the all-digital version will be getting a price hike, despite being 30 percent smaller, and weighing 24 percent less, than its existing counterpart. Once inventory for the larger launch models is all sold out, Sony says these new versions will be the only ones available to buy.

The detachable disc drive will be $80 to buy separately, meaning if you do buy the all-digital model and hope to upgrade later it will actually cost you more than just getting the $500 disc-ready version from the jump. It’s a surprising pricing strategy given that Sony makes better margins on digital game downloads, the only purchases owners of the all-digital model can make. The new PS5s won’t come with a vertical stand in the box either. That will cost $30 extra.

Usually game consoles get cheaper the longer they are on the market, but reduced supply during the pandemic and a spike in inflation rates last year led Sony to actually raise the prices on its consoles in most of the world in 2022. Now it appears those price hikes are getting sneakily introduced to U.S. customers as well. Sony and competitor Microsoft have both raised the prices of their Netflix-like subscription libraries as well.

Sony said earlier this year that it plans to sell a record-breaking 25 million PS5s in its 2023 to 2024 fiscal year. It’s tried to achieve that in part through discounted bundles like the God of War Ragnarök one that was marked down by $50 earlier this year. A new Spider-Man 2 PS5 bundle includes the upcoming blockbuster for $10 off the sticker price. The sales will likely help the company sell through its existing stock of launch units, paving the way for the new slim models to become the default moving forward.

Update 10/10/2023 2:54 p.m. ET: Added information about the PS5 slim stand.

         

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