There are a lot of games to play these days. This isn’t new information. But when people talk about there being so many games, they usually mean ones that have just released, or are about to release. That’s the natural reaction - we all want a piece of the next big thing. The latest releases are fresh experiences that (hopefully) have cutting edge tech which means they leave games from the last generation in the dirt, and most importantly, all your friends are playing them too.
Beyond the hottest releases though, there are still so many games. From last year, from five years ago, from ten years ago, and even further back. There’s never enough time to play them all and some gems are bound to slip through the cracks. So why arePlayStationPlus' Must Play Games so wide of the mark?
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I was trying to make space on myPS5hard drive recently, a position I’m sure we’ve all found ourselves in before, and because I like to create problems for myself, rather than deleting existing games I decided to browse through PS Plus to check if there were any other games I wanted to add to the pile. I don’t check the catalogue very often - something imperceptible makes me choose PS overXboxfor cross-platform games, but scrolling through Game Pass is still something I make time for a lot. With PS Plus, it’s a rarity.
Immediately, I was reminded why. PlayStation Plus has a selection of Must Play Games, but that ‘must’ is up for debate. There are some decent picks in there. The first games to pop up areKena: Bridge of SpiritsandDoom Eternal, which are both pretty good. Not 101 Games To Play Before You Die territory, but they’re okay. If someone asked me ‘should I play these’, I’d say ‘sure’. The Evil Within, Sackboy’s Big Adventure, andGhostwire: Tokyoare all in the catalogue too, and all fit the bill. Alongside those, there are some standouts that live up to the billing -Uncharted 4(as part of the Legacy of Thieves Collection), Slay the Spire, and the grossly underrated Paradise Killer are in there too.
A couple of others are questionable. Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is in there, which is probably Doom Eternal levels of ‘must’, but so is The Old Blood, which feels kinda tacked on. There’s also the disappointingRiders Republic, the newly releasedTchiawhich fizzled, and most confusingly of all, Bassmaster Fishing. Tchia just about has the shine of being new, but in what world are the other two ‘must play’ games. Even as a sports game fan, I found Riders underwhelming and see no appeal in a fishing sim.
I understand that there’s a business decision being made here. By pushing fairly recent games, PlayStation is able to do two things - firstly, plenty of these games have microtransactions, meaning both the studio and Sony itself can still make money from giving away the game for free. Secondly, it advertises PlayStation Plus as having the hottest new releases. I don’t know if there’s a third advantage (that studios can pay to have games in the shop window), so I’ll focus on the first two for now.
With microtransactions, the money coming in must be tiny when you only look at games that were picked up specifically because they were placed in the Must Play section, and only games that actually have in-game stores, and then only the revenue slice Sony itself gets from those transactions. It’s not the sort of income it makes sense to build a business model around.
Then there’s the idea that Sony serves up the freshest games in town. While it’s true that Sony exclusives are bigger hits critically and commercially than Microsoft’s, this is not a battle PlayStation can win. Xbox’s exclusives are free on Game Pass at launch, while big PS exclusives take months at least, and some never arrive at all.
There’s another game in the list I haven’t mentioned - Anodyne. I hadn’t heard of it before, and it looks kind of cool. Being in Sony’s Must Play feels like it’s a mighty endorsement too. But that means nothing when it’s surrounded by middling games everyone has heard of and a couple of misfires. Sony has a hugely impressive collection and lots of space across the Plus catalogue to promote games that, for whatever reason, it deems fit to promote. But that space should not be the part of the storefront that masquerades as being curated.
Game Pass will always beat PlayStation Plus for new games because Microsoft is committed to day one launches and Sony is not. But Plus could lean on Sony’s history and style itself as having the most depth, the best storefront to browse, by always giving insightful recommendations tailored to each player, or even just showing off an assortment of its history that mixes top level games with hidden gems. Instead it wants me to play the dirt bike game. Again. How can the service win fans this way?
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