New Survey Details What Could Be A Revamp of PlayStation Plus

PlayStation Plus is Sony's very own subscription-based service. With a fee of only $17.99/3 months or $49.99/year, you gain access to a wide variety of free and discounted content. Among the selection is free psn, mini, ps one, and the occassional ps3 game as well as free 1hr game trials for any and all full-length PS3 games on the PlayStation Store. The later feature not only gives us a peek at what retail titles are coming to the Store during that month, but also a nice one hour, hands-on experience of the title in question, this could either make or break the sale for that developer. While these features are good, and well worth the asking price, expanding upon the offerings could attract a broader audience to Sony's service. This new survey, found by IGN, may give us a peek at what new features are coming to PlayStation Plus.


The image above details what could be three new subscription plans for PlayStation Plus. These three choices include your current features - except choice 2 which omits the free PS1 and arcade games - along with some newer ones, namely full blu-ray games. What this means is that new games (as detailed by the third option) or older games will be available to download throughout the year.

In the case of the third option, only one game will be available, whereas with options 1 and 2 you are getting up to 15 games throughout the year. With such a wealth of full-retail games, a price increase would be needed, which you can find on the bottom part of the feature grid. While the price increase would be mostly justifiable, the third option seems like it'd be the most valuable.

With the third option, you're still getting a full-retail game, with the best feature of them all; discounts on ALL DLC and Games from the PlayStation Store. What this means is that instead of waiting for a developer to give Sony the "OK" to discount a title, Sony can willingly do it for all games and DLC when they want to. While this discount could cause a discrepancy in the pricing structure of future games - the base price could see an increase so that your discount would seem to be more than it would pre-option 3 - DLC that typically retails at a standard price i.e. $15/map pack for COD would now be cheaper on PSN than any other online service. Using this method, Sony could attract more customers to their service, and in turn gain more revenue from the added subscriber base.

All in all, these changes are welcome, and I would personally like to see any of them, most notably option 3 though, to be implemented in the near future.

New Survey Details What Could Be A Revamp of PlayStation Plus

As I already said, i approve of Option 3.

Why are there different benefits in options 1 and 2, but the price is the same?

I'm still waiting for the stuff this other survey supposedly foretold for the PS Store.

I've taken these types of surveys before. Don't read too much into the actual numbers in a single screenshot. How these surveys usually work is they'll take you through like 30 sets of choices while changing details in each set to see what people like better, and which details they prioritize.

yeah same here, option 3 sounds like the best. I could find full blu-ray games for cheap with CAG.

I love the idea of plus and the content for it but I loathe the price. Maybe like $30 a year then I may consider it. Still probably won't get it but I would at least consider it.

[quote name='mr_burnzz']I love the idea of plus and the content for it but I loathe the price. Maybe like $30 a year then I may consider it. Still probably won't get it but I would at least consider it.[/QUOTE]
I might consider keeping PS+ for HALF of your reasonable amount, but only if it had the options of the C column above and certainly only if the percentage of discount remained constant at 75% off.

[quote name='Scorch']Why are there different benefits in options 1 and 2, but the price is the same?[/QUOTE]

yeah.. that's what i'm wondering too?

id like to see them add in the ability to gift items on psn to people. itd be cool to also have an option to keep a game or 2 permanently at the end of a years worth of plus sub. they should also throw in a free movie here or there and bring back the rewards program. huh looks like theyre upping the price for psn if thats the case they better damn well fix alot of the issues it has like slow dl speeds. i know 60 is just 10 more than 50 but anytime a service starts to increase price you wonder if this will become a normal event.

So option 3 seems the best because it is all tripple A games in the catalog, that is the way I am interpreting it.

Option 3 IMO seems the best bang for the buck
The one thing I wish they would do is either give 1 or 2 free rentals per month or a discount for PSN+ members like $.99 (24hr rental) to compete with Redbox

I agree that option C looks to be the best. While I do have a few full games on my hard drive from PS+ and a couple I bought, I am not a fan of downloading and storing 10+gb games, and re-downloading them if the hard drive needs to be reformatted. I have to figure plenty of people would need to upgrade their hard drives if they went with option A. I have a 500gb on one and 160gb on a second and the first would be filled rather quickly with 20 10+gb games with what's currently on it and the second wouldn't be an option without an upgrade.

Id go with C. Why would you want Option B? Really.... 45 games a year with no A quality games @_@

Out of context, it sounds kinda funny ..
"Free access to Call of Duty Elite: No / No / No" -- as long as they are promising to keep their Call of Duty to themselves, all three plans sound like a good deal. ;P

On a more serious note, personally I'm not sure if I'd bite for $8/month. I like PS Plus primarily for its free games, and ~$4/month is just barely low enough for me to jump on-board with the current PS Plus service. $4/month ($50/year) is low enough where I won't see myself conflicted every year, choosing between "pay another $50 this year or lose access to all of the free games I've collected thus far" .. but making it $100 (or more) makes it much harder to make the initial year's subscription because I wouldn't be as certain that I'd renew.

I guess the only way I'd be convinced to go with any of those plans is if I saw them routinely adding games on my "highly wanted" list.. games I'd be buying anyway.. but I mostly play niche games/genres, so that would probably not be the case...

So I'm hoping PS Plus just stays as it is with a single plan model.