For over two years now, PlayStation Plus subscribers who owned a PS5 got access to the PlayStation Plus Collection, a set of 19 legacy PS4 games available for free download and play via the console’s backward compatibility. This week, Sony announced that it will be ending this subscriber benefit in May. Current PS5 owners will have until then to redeem their free games, which will remain available on their account as long as they stay subscribed to any of PlayStation Plus’ multiple tiers.
Hundreds of legacy PS4 games are still available for download as part of the higher-end PlayStation Plus “Extra” and “Premium” tiers (starting at $14.99/month or $99.99/year). That list includes many of the 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” pricing tier ($9.99/month or $59.99/year).
The PlayStation Plus Collection served as a valuable introduction to legacy PlayStation franchises for PS5 owners who never owned a PS4. Sony said in an earnings release last night that such users made up a full 30 percent of the PS5’s monthly active users, suggesting that “the acquisition of new users is progressing,” as the company put it. Players who did upgrade from a PS4 to a PS5, meanwhile, are spending significantly more time and money on the new console on average, according to Sony.
The sunsetting of the PlayStation Plus Collection comes as Sony promises that long-standing retail shortages of PS5 hardware should be easing thanks to increasing supplies and despite “unprecedented demand.” PlayStation Plus currently boasts 46.4 million subscribers across all consoles, Sony said, a number that has remained essentially flat over the last two years.
Microsoft, meanwhile, announced that it had reached 25 million Game Pass subscribers last January, and Sony publicly estimated that number had grown to 29 million by November. Both those subscriber numbers are up significantly from the 18 million Game Pass subscribers Microsoft claimed in early 2021, though that subscriber growth is reportedly well behind Microsoft’s targets.
Subscription numbers for both console subscription services might be hitting a saturation point, though. As Xbox CEO Phil Spencer said in remarks last October, “at some point, you’ve reached everybody on console that wants to subscribe.”
Here’s the full list of the PlayStation Plus Collection games that will be departing in May (games still available on the Extra/Premium tier are noted with a *):
- 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*
