Last week, after months of rumours and speculation - which we were right about, by the way - Sony unveiled its new future for PS Plus. From June onwards, it will be a three-tiered service that combines PS Plus and PS Now into one service that will offer free monthly games, a huge library of PS4 and PS5 titles, and retro games available to download and stream.
Players who were already subscribed to PS Now were happy to hear they'd be upgraded to the highest tier of PS Plus at no extra cost, effectively saving them 50 percent of the price. Some savvy players even managed to stack ten years of PS Now subscriptions to guarantee half-price PS Plus until 2032. Unfortunately, that may no longer be possible.
As reported by Eurogamer, Sony has now removed the option to purchase an annual subscription to PS Now. At the time of writing, you can only buy a monthly subscription.
This has obviously been done to prevent players from exploiting the loophole as they have already. The gold rush was good while it lasted, but it seems like it's over, time to pack up and go home. It would have been nice for Sony to announce when it would make the PS Now subscription unavailable, that wouldn't have been profitable. This isn't the first time it's pulled an anti-consumer move, and it almost certainly won't be the last.
The new PS Plus isn't quite Xbox Game Pass, nor is it Nintendo Switch Online, it's something in between. It won't have day one additions of new first-party games like Game Pass does, but it will apparently have games from all major publishers. We don't know if this includes Activision Blizzard games too, as this publisher was recently bought by Microsoft for almost $70 billion.
Unfortunately, Sony's vast PS3 library will only be available via cloud streaming, and even then only for regions that have the infrastructure to support it. Those in South America will be offered a consolation highest tier without streaming.