What does the new subscription service include? How was the experience?
In the new membership subscription service, the “Basic” of Tier 1 is basically the same as the previous “PlayStation Plus”, providing monthly free games, small discounts in some stores, and allowing players to play online multiplayer games. This stall is priced at HK$48 per month, HK$128 per quarter and HK$308 per year. If the monthly fee is multiplied by 12, the annual fee is basically equivalent to half-price purchase (53.4%).
The second service is called “upgrade” – this translation is a bit strange, the English is “Extra”, let’s call them 1, 2, and 3 for the time being. Tier 2 includes the entire content of Tier 1, plus additional PS4, PS5 game subscriptions. This is also the core part of the entire service that benchmarks against XGP. There are a total of 238 games in the library, but the PS4 and PS5 versions of many games such as “Guardians of the Galaxy”, “Ghostwalker”, “Asset Corsa” are listed separately, and “Death Stranding” is also included. There are regular version and director’s cut version, “Watch Dogs” and “Star Ocean” are listed in different languages. The most exaggerated is “Final Fantasy 10/10-2 HD Remastered Edition” for PS4, which are in Chinese and Korean versions, respectively. The English and Japanese versions take up 3 game slots.
According to rough statistics, after removing duplicate items, there are currently 224 games provided by the second-tier service of PlayStation Plus in Hong Kong. Its monthly, quarterly and annual prices are HK$75, HK$215 and HK$515 respectively. If you compare it with the first gear, it is equivalent to spending an extra HK$207 per year to play Curry’s games.
The game library is okay, with exclusives like “Death Return” and “Soul of Tsushima: Director’s Cut”
The third tier “Premium” service is more special, in addition to the content of the first two tiers, it also includes some minor items, such as classic games for PSP, PS and PS2, demo versions of new games, and some replays on PS4. Produced PS3 games… In addition, in regions where cloud game servers are available, this tier 3 also includes cloud game versions of PS3 games. Since the Hong Kong server does not support cloud games, the price of the third tier will be lower accordingly. The current price of the Hong Kong service is HK$85 per month, HK$239 per quarter, and HK$599 per year.
Classic Games includes some old games on PSP, PS and PS2 platforms, as well as PS3 games that have been remade on PS4. The current number of the two is not much. The former has a total of 17, including “Tekken 2”, “Infinite Corridor”, “Catch the Monkey”, “Volkswagen Golf”, etc. There are also 4 related works of the “Jack and Dust” series. . In addition to “Tekken 2”, even players who do not have a subscription service can buy it directly.
The number of classic games is not much for the time being, but there should be a larger expansion in the future
Some players who have experienced it said that some classic games did not run well and the frame rate was low. This has something to do with Sony using the PAL instead of the NTSC version of the first party classic. I tried “Catch the Monkey”, “Tekken 2” and “Infinite Corridor”. The frame rate of “Catch the Monkey” is obviously not as good as that of the third-party “Tekken 2”, while “Infinite Corridor” performs even worse, even in the display The lower part of the frame also has a white border.
The problem with the remake is bigger – not that there must be something wrong with it running, but why they are in this membership slot. In theory, these 35 games were officially released on PS4, remakes or not, so they should probably stay in Tier 2 like other PS4 games.
Said to be 35 games, in fact, it also includes games such as “The Last of Us: Remake” and “Uncharted Seas: The Nathan Drake Collection” that were previously included in the “PlayStation Plus Collection”, as well as the “Bioshock Collection”. The “Bioshock Remake”, “Bioshock 2 Remake” and “Bioshock: Infinite Complete Edition” were dismantled again. Of course, the tradition of separating the PS4 and PS5 versions as two games is still alive and well, “Saints Row 3” : Remastered Edition takes on that responsibility.
As for the demo part – it’s not the workhorse of this subscription, but why do I need to buy the highest tier subscription to play a trial version of a game? It’s hard for me to understand, but anyway, that’s how Sony designed it, there are currently 15 games in the demo pack, with time limits ranging from 2 to 5 hours. The biggest cards are “Horizon: West End” and “Cyberpunk 2077”, both of which can be played for 5 hours each, but like “Uncharted: Rogue Legacy Collection”, which only allows you to play for 2 hours, don’t you think? Are you afraid that you can get through the customs in 5 hours?
Also, while we’ve heard rumors before that “Sony wants to make demos of games over $34,” it shouldn’t be the same thing as this demo pack. The “Horizon: West End” in the demo package shows that 187GB of content needs to be downloaded. I compared it with the full version in my library. 187GB is the combined size of the PS4 and PS5 full versions. That is to say, the trial version is the full version of the game with the 5-hour lock added, or the two versions are downloaded together. For traffic players and campus network players, this kind of trial is a bit tasteless.
So far, PlayStation Plus’ new subscription service has looked like an insincere, duck-in-the-shelf product, but the biggest controversy about it — and probably not one, since pretty much everyone has the same voice — – It’s a question of price.
According to the annual fee, there are 3 grades, namely 308 Hong Kong dollars, 515 Hong Kong dollars and 599 Hong Kong dollars. Frankly speaking, this is not too expensive. If it is purchased by new players, 599 Hong Kong dollars is basically equivalent to buying a full-price PS5 game ( 568 Hong Kong dollars), it is not a loss to play a few big games. However, after the keen old players went online, they found that they needed to “make up the difference”, and the price was still a lot.
My membership is about to expire, I don’t need to make up too much
We have had a similar experience before. When Microsoft upgraded the gold member to the XGP member, it was all solved with a wave of a big hand and spent 10 Hong Kong dollars. Of course, on the one hand, Microsoft has a lot of money and doesn’t care about this little money. On the other hand, it has left itself a bit of a curse. Until now, we can also buy the service of converting gold members to XGP at a low price. Moreover, XGP is not a complete success, and it is not unacceptable for Sony to ask players to make up the price difference.
We don’t know if Sony will revise this policy in the next few days, but at least on May 24th, players will need to upgrade all their remaining membership days at once, according to the price of the new service and the “price when buying a member” The difference, calculate the unit price per day, and then convert it into the difference that needs to be made up.
Let’s take an example. Assuming that the player has previously purchased a PlayStation Plus membership and is now automatically converted to the first tier “Basic”, to upgrade to two higher tiers, the difference must be paid. But the problem is that if you bought a 10-year membership before, if you want to upgrade, you have to make up the 10-year price difference at one time, and there is no other option. This action really stunned people.
And users who have purchased membership through discounts before are even worse. Suppose you purchased a 1-year PlayStation Plus membership with the original price of HKD 308 on January 1, 2022 through the usual 25% discount, and actually paid HKD 231, which is valid until January 1, 2023. On May 24, 2022, if you want to upgrade your membership to the highest tier 3 “Premium”, you need to make up the price difference for the next 222 days, which is (599-231) × 222/365, that is, you need to pay 223.82 HKD.
Or to put it more simply, the membership purchased by the player with a 25% discount will expire in one year, costing 231 Hong Kong dollars, which is worth 308 Hong Kong dollars. From the player’s point of view, according to normal logic, you only need to pay 291 Hong Kong dollars (599-308) for the upgrade, but Sony doesn’t think so. Sony thinks that you should pay 368 Hong Kong dollars (599-231), which is equivalent to giving it away. The offer is back.
Almost all member users belong to the superposition of the above-mentioned situations – not only “make up the difference”, but also “make up the discount”, and pay all at once. Discounts were originally something that favored players, but now they have become cannibal traps that induce payment and eat them in one bite. It’s a fantasy.
In addition, if you remember, on August 1, 2019, PlayStation Plus members experienced a price increase, and the annual fee was adjusted from HKD 268 to the current HKD 308. At that time, many people took advantage of the last 25% discount before the price increase. Having been a member for a long time, “10 years of uninvited fans” has turned from a joke to a reality at that time, because many people really have 10-year membership.
If we calculate it as a 25% discount member purchased on August 1, 2019 (actually buy some earlier, but we can’t determine the time of the last discount), the original price is 268 Hong Kong dollars, after the discount is 201 Hong Kong dollars, and it will expire on August 1, 2029. . On May 24, 2022, the old player opened his PSN store and found that if he needed to upgrade to the highest tier 3 service, he needed to make up the difference. The 3,653-day membership that I originally purchased has 2,626 days left, which is (599-201) × 2,626/365, and needs to pay 2,863.42 Hong Kong dollars… In fact, 10 years is already a relatively convergent number. Today’s social media Players who make up 5,000, 6,000, or even more than 8,000 Hong Kong dollars are constantly exposed on the platform. The most incomprehensible thing is that these money must be made up at one time – you can’t “try it for a month” like a new account, but either don’t pay it and maintain the lowest membership plan, or directly upgrade for 10 years.