‘It Should Be Free to Play Online Games’: PS Plus Price Squeeze Taken to Task by PS5 Owners

I think you can learn a lot about PS Plus Essential’s latest price hike by looking at which options are going up.

Sony is only increasing the one-month and three-month subscriptions; it’s not making any changes to the annual option.

Furthermore, this change will only affect new or lapsed customers; if you’re already committed to a rolling plan, your price won’t change. (At least not for now.)

What can we learn from this? Well, I think it suggests Sony wants to make you think twice about subscribing for short periods; it wants you to commit, either to a year or at least to a rolling membership.

I suspect there are a number of people out there who will subscribe on-and-off depending on which games they want to play; there’s probably a flurry of activity around tentpole multiplayer releases, like Call of Duty and Battlefield.

Obviously GTA 6 is due out in November, and is likely to result in an increase of subscriptions if there’s a new GTA Online mode to go along with it. (Which seems certain, although will it be available day one?)

Whatever the case, I think this latest adjustment is designed to make the annual subscription look more enticing, as there’s much more value for Sony if you’re locked in. And if you don’t want to do that, you’re going to have to pay a higher price.

Of course, there’s a big question here about whether paying to play online in 2026 even makes sense.

Sony’s own post on the price increase is getting ratioed in the replies, with one prolific user pointing out: “Blaming market conditions is insane. It should be free to play online games without paywalls in 2026.”

Indeed, I broadly agree that blaming market conditions seems asinine at a time when PlayStation just posted record financial results, pocketing a cool ~$3 billion operating income for the previous fiscal year.

Obviously Sony is being squeezed by economic factors out of its control, but these largely impact the cost of manufacturing hardware, and so it’s easier to justify price increases to the consoles themselves. Online services make less sense.

But on that note, I’d direct your attention to a comment made late last year from Sony CFO Lin Tao: she said the company’s plan is to offset surging costs by “monetising the install base”. Here’s an example of exactly that.

Ultimately, if you’re a paid up member of PS Plus Essential who’s willing to commit to annual subscriptions, then this isn’t going to impact you at all.

But if you bounce around, subscribing for one-off months here and there, then you’re going to have to cough up. Sony wants you to commit; it doesn’t want you to dip in and out.

I think questions have to be asked about whether the PS Plus model is the right one moving forwards.

Obviously it’s revenue Sony’s never going to want to give away, but at what point does this begin to affect the performance of paid multiplayer games on its platform, like Marathon and Helldivers 2 – both of which sold much better on PC, where you don’t need a subscription.

Call of Duty still performs best on console, but as confirmed by PS5’s new player tracking data, it’s dwarfed by Fortnite, which doesn’t require PS Plus Essential.

As one fan noted in response to PlayStation’s price increase news: “I’m good. I’ll just play multiplayer games on PC I guess.”

I think Sony’s walking a delicate tightrope here, and it’s going to need to be very careful. While I appreciate some of these price increases genuinely are a consequence of “market conditions”, there’s only so much consumers are going to take.

Things can’t keep going up week after week after week.

And with PC’s popularity surging, there’s a very legitimate danger here. Yes, the online experience on PlayStation is generally cleaner overall, but crossplay has resulted in hackers infecting console games anyway. What are the real benefits these days?

Sony may want to stop its users from dipping in and out, but if it squeezes players too hard, they may simply choose not to dip in at all.