PS5 owners won’t get this set of free PS4 games for much longer
Enlarge / An overview of the games available in the PlayStation Plus collection, which will no longer be offered to PS5 subscribers from May. For over two years now, PlayStation Plus subscribers who owned a PS5 have had access to the PlayStation Plus Collection, a set of 19 older PS4 games available to download for free and playable through the console’s backward compatibility. This week, Sony announced that it would end this benefit for subscribers in May. Current PS5 owners will have to use their free games until then, which will remain available on their account as long as they remain subscribed to one of the multiple tiers of PlayStation Plus.
Hundreds of legacy PS4 games are still available to download as part of the high-end PlayStation Plus “Extra” and “Premium” tiers (from $14.99/month or $99.99/year). This list includes many titles that were part of the PlayStation Plus collection, including almost all of Sony’s first-party titles. But the PlayStation Plus Collection was also available at the cheapest “Essential” price tier ($9.99/month or $59.99/year).
The PlayStation Plus Collection served as a valuable introduction to past PlayStation franchises for PS5 owners who have never owned a PS4. Sony said in an earnings statement last night that those users make up 30% of the PS5’s monthly active users, suggesting “new user acquisition is progressing,” as the company put it. Gamers who have upgraded from a PS4 to a PS5, meanwhile, are spending significantly more time and money on the new console on average, according to Sony.
The end of the PlayStation Plus collection comes as Sony promises that long-standing shortages of PS5 hardware should ease thanks to increased supply and despite “unprecedented demand”. PlayStation Plus currently has 46.4 million subscribers across all consoles, Sony said, a number that has remained essentially flat for the past two years.
Microsoft, meanwhile, announced it hit 25 million Game Pass subscribers last January, and Sony publicly estimated that number had risen to 29 million in November. Both of these subscriber numbers have grown significantly from Microsoft’s claimed 18 million Game Pass subscribers at the start of 2021, though that subscriber growth is reportedly well below Microsoft’s goals.
However, subscription numbers for both console subscription services could be reaching a saturation point. As Xbox CEO Phil Spencer said last October, “at some point you’ve reached everyone on console who wants to subscribe.”
Here’s the full list of PlayStation Plus Collection games coming out in May (games still available on the Extra/Premium tier are marked with *):
Batman: Arkham Knight* Battlefield 1 Bloodborne* Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy Days Gone* Detroit: Become Human* Fallout 4* Final Fantasy XV* God of War* Infamous Second Son* Monster Hunter World Mortal Kombat X Ratchet and Clank Resident Evil 7: Biohazard The Last Guardian* The Last of Us Remastered Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End* Until Dawn*