Sony are once again treating their fanbase as retarded paypigs.
I’m still struggling to come up with one solid reasoning behind why live services and online subscriptions provide anything substantial considering how I as a PC player have been playing online for the low price of “fuck all” I cannot help but snicker at the fact that console consumers not only get bend over in buying increasingly expensive and irrelevant systems but then ravaged by Microsoft and Sony when it comes to mandatory subscription fees for basic online functionality.
Microsoft have always been forcing consumers to bend over for online connectivity within their XBOX ecosystem, it’s even more prevalent now thanks to their immensely successful Game Pass service subscription allowing gamers to essentially hire literally hundreds of titles for play on either XBOX or even PC.
Sony and Nintendo caught onto the trend, for the longest time, up until the spawn of the PlayStation 4, Sony were contempt with offering free online service for all PlayStation owners, introducing its PlayStation Plus service subscription in 2010 as a means for gamers to access additional content and store discounts, but that rapidly changed as Sony grew more distant from its former home nation of Japan.
With the launch of the PlayStation 4, Sony’s hunger for the money that Microsoft had been easily generating with its XBOX Live subscription boiled over, Sony had bit the bullet and forced its console owners into buying a PlayStation Plus subscription just so they can play their games online with others, greedy bastards.
When it was first introduced back in 2013 it had cost as much as $50 extra for a full years subscription to PlayStation Plus, but obviously times have changed rapidly since then with the massive influx of so called “inflation” resulting in skyrocketing prices for civil goods and services, leading to companies shitting out record profits each and every quarter, just like how the Russian invasion of Ukraine was allegedly the cause of petrol prices spiking up across the entire world, never mind how oil companies actually generated their largest profits ever since.
Ain’t that a fucking coincidence?
Sony in their infinite wisdom really loves fucking over its userbase, as the company looks to hike up its mandatory PlayStation Plus service subscription prices by over 35%.
Thirty fucking five percent, for a mandatory subscription just so users can actually connect their ~$500 console to the internet. Fair dinkum.
The changes go live next month and will see the base PlayStation Plus service increase from $60 USD to $80 USD, an increase of over 33%, while additional benefit subscriptions for the most depraved gamer such as a PlayStation Plus Extra yearly subscription will increase from $100 USD to $135 USD while the most expensive package, the Premium subscription will increase from $120 USD to a staggering $160.
Can you imagine paying $160 per year for online connectivity for your $500 console, just so you can poorly stream PS1 / PS2 / PSP and PS3 games to your high-tech console through the magic of the cloud, isn’t that a fucking steal? And the best part of all is the fact that you still cannot actually emulate the games natively if you actually owned games from said systems.
$160 per year to use your own internet connection plus the lucrative ability of streaming old games to your fancy system, what a bargain because I’ve been enjoying emulation of all aforementioned PlayStation consoles on the PC for the low price of my ISP’s data cap limit which just so happens to be unlimited.
Sony fans are a lovely bunch, they are genuinely worse than Apple fans and just like them they too enjoy face filling scoops of faeces considering how the PS5 doesn’t actually have any legitimate form of backwards compatibility whatsoever.
Including the aforementioned online service price hikes combined with the recent announcement of the brand new “PSP” streaming device which is a glorified paperweight, it really seems that the folks over at Sony Interactive Entertainment are doing all they can to fuck over its customer base and wringing their pockets dry, because I haven’t even mentioned the kicker about September’s changes to PlayStation Plus, because every month PS4 / PS5 owners gain access to 2-3 new games for absolutely nothing.
The punchline for September is that PlayStation gamers get to experience the wonders of the WOKE abomination that was the Saints Row reboot, a game that Volition should actually be paying you to take off their hands, to give it away for free is like gleefully infecting passersby with HIV.
