Sony Jacking Up Annual PlayStation Plus Plans By as Much as $40 (engadget.com) 20
A couple months after Microsoft revealed plans to increase Game Pass subscription prices, Sony is getting in on the act. From a report: The company is bumping up the annual prices of all three PlayStation Plus plans on September 6th. An annual Essential subscription will soon cost $80 per year, up from $60. The Extra plan is going up by $35 to $135 per year, while an annual Premium plan will soon cost $40 more at $160. The price changes won't take effect for current PS Plus users on an annual plan until their next renewal date that's on or after November 6th. If you make any changes to your plan between September 6th and then (such as changing tiers), the new pricing will apply. Sony has not announced changes to the monthly ($10 for Essential, $15 for Extra and $18 for Premium) or quarterly ($25 for Essential, $40 for Extra and $50 for Premium) for the time being. It notes that the annual plan is still less expensive than a monthly or quarterly subscription in the long run.
Just buy a PC... (Score:1)
This is what one gets with DRM-ed devices. No choice and forced price hikes. And to boot, this after paying a scalper for the console itself.
For gaming, just buy a Windows box. Steam isn't perfect, but and GOG are the best things going for gaming out there.
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You'd need to buy a lot of games before you see any kind of savings from switching to PC gaming. Granted you don't need anything terribly expensive depending on what games you may want to play and several popular titles run just fine on inexpensive laptops released six years ago, but it's not as simple as your
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Yes, but you can't get pornhub on your console.
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Also most people preaching this assume the person is going to build a PC when many dont know or want to hassle with that. Combine with the fact that;
- Most prebuilt "gaming systems" are awful and overly expensive
- Most gaming laptops are trash as actual computers, are very thermally throttled and the battery life may as well be nonexistant.
- Some people have large libraries on of the primary console platforms they don't want to rebuy
- You need space to have a computer desk
- The FOMO on gaming PC hardware a
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Even though the mining boom has been over for a while now, PC components are still rather expensive. A GPU comparable to what's in the consoles is going to cost almost as much as the entire console.
You'd need to buy a lot of games before you see any kind of savings from switching to PC gaming. Granted you don't need anything terribly expensive depending on what games you may want to play and several popular titles run just fine on inexpensive laptops released six years ago, but it's not as simple as your post suggests.
Your GPU is going to be a lot more powerful than a console will. Also you're wrong as you can get a good GPU for around £300. The NVIDIA tax is also dropping as supply increases (miners were only half the problem, supply shortages were a bigger issue). OTOH a 3 yr old PS5 is still £400.
As an avid PC gamer, I'll be the first to admit that the cost of entry is higher, especially if you're building from scratch and don't have parts to cannibalise from your last gaming boxen. However, the total c
Mickeysoft is working very hard (Score:1)
to make Windows the same pay rent or else shit as consoles.
Locking them the fuck down with TPM requirements and putting as much spy/malware-as-an-operating-system as possible. Randomly resetting program defaults, putting fucking ads in menus. In fact, they do literally NOTHING that doesn't involve rent seeking in some way.
TPM not DRM (Score:2)
It was added to Windows 11 to fix some gaping security holes affecting enterprise IT while still maintaining backwards compatibility because key parts of the system rely upon insecure hashing methods for authentication, and shared computers need some kind of basic full disk encryption even if imperfect. TPMs cannot and do not provide any kind of DRM because there is no way for software developers to know wha
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It gets used to block 'unsigned code' - I think you understand how that can and will be used for DRM.
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This is what one gets with DRM-ed devices. No choice and forced price hikes. And to boot, this after paying a scalper for the console itself.
For gaming, just buy a Windows box. Steam isn't perfect, but and GOG are the best things going for gaming out there.
Yep, this is why I like being a PC gamer, not only are the games cheaper, there are a lot more of them.
Time to give up (Score:2)
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Or you could you know, just not subscribe to PSPlus? That was always an option...
PSPlus is a requirement for multiplayer games, which is sleezy as hell. I bought each of my kids his own PS5 before I knew about the PSPlus requirement, but now I'm leaning heavily towards convincing them to sell the pieces of crap.
The hype machine behind the PS5 far, far exceeded the console's actual worth. The PS5 is far and away Sony's worst console offering ever (relative to the era in which they were released), and might be worth half the price being charged. And Sony has the worst game return policy a
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PSPlus is a requirement for multiplayer games, which is sleezy as hell.
I agree with the sleazy part, however are we not entering a golden age where really not playing multiplayer is pretty viable?
My last few games were:
Stray
Horizon: Forbidden West
Jedi Survivor
Soon: Baldurs Gate 3
All single player.
I've not needed multiplayer for ages, indeed have been more or less avoiding games where that was a core as it just became too frustrating.
I know there's a very huge COD crowd (or people tha play similar ga
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You should sell the PS5 for as much as you can get for it, as it deprives Sony of a sale when someone isn't saving all that much by buying used as they would have bought new. Put the returns towards a GPU. Or, you know, something completely different.
Dammit, people, show some spine! (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as consumers are willing to go along with the idea that even devices you bought and paid for can be reduced to de facto rentals, corporations will jump all over them. Cars with basic features you have to pay for by the month, game consoles that only play crippleware unless you buck up every month, operating systems that won't run on perfectly adequate computers, basic office software that can only be rented, not bought, "cloud" storage that can deny you access to vital data if your credit card maxes out, farm equipment, laptops and cell phones designed to be unrepairable, except by a dealer who can't wait to rape your wallet...the beat goes on.
What really hurts is that people like me, who hate this business model and fight it every way we can, still get dragged along by the overwhelming mass of people who won't care about what they're giving away until it's far too late to do anything but find somebody else to blame for their own fecklessness.
Not long until the gravy train derails (Score:2)
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I sold my consoles some years back, got more out of my remaining gaming collection than I spent on it (I had a few rare titles and peripherals, all of which I got at budget prices) and am now gaming on Linux mostly using Proton-GE. I have probably shed more game systems than I sold at the end over the years in total, but I still came out consistently ahead except maybe when I sold my Ladybug cocktail system. But I would have had to get rid of that since anyway.
I could emulate pretty much everything I got ri
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Well done! It's good to know at least a few people escaped from these ghouls and made a few bucks out of it.