Today would be a good day to add another year to your PS Plus subscription if you want to keep it going: the prices are going up significantly on 6 September. Following in the footsteps of Microsoft, which put up the prices of Game Pass earlier this year, Sony is upping the cost of its annual subscriptions by at least 19% in the UK, 20% in Europe and 33% in the US.
What does that mean for you?
The best PlayStation Plus plan, Premium, is going up from £99.99 to £119.99. PlayStation Plus Extra is increasing from £83.99 to £99.99. And PlayStation Plus Essentials, the cheapest subscription offering, is increasing from £49.99 to £59.99.
If you're in the US, the prices are going up to $160 for Premium, $135 for Extra and $80 for Essential. And in Europe the new prices will be €152 for Premium, €126 for Extra and €72 for Essential.
Is PlayStation Plus worth the money?
That very much depends on what you want to play.
We've talked about the pros and cons of PlayStation Plus before, but these price hikes perhaps make the cons more of an issue. The biggest drawback is that unlike Xbox Game Pass, you don't get day-one releases of triple-A games; while big blockbusters do make it to the service eventually, they take a long time because Sony wants to maximise sales.
That means the main draw here is best described as "play old PlayStation games". And that's great if you like playing older games a lot. But the problem with old games, for me anyway, is that on Game Pass and Steam there's a constant flow of new games I want to play more – so while I like the idea of having access to lots of older titles, I don't actually play them. With Starfield, a new Spider-Man and more arriving very soon my play time is already fully booked for the next few months.
PlayStation Plus is a decent service with a really big games catalogue. But with the price going up quite considerably it does mean for gamers like me with Game Pass, a Steam account and a second-hand game disc habit it's increasingly hard to justify the expense when the cost of everything is increasing and my wages aren't.
That said, my subscription period ends in November, just before Black Friday – and Sony typically discounts PS Plus for that, so I may renew if the price falls low enough again. If your subscription has a while to go yet you might want to do the same – you can stack your subscriptions so your new one takes over when the old one ends.
