For the most part, Sony has been doing everything right for the past year. Whether it be supporting independent developers or talking about the focus of the PS4, it’s made very strategically sound moves… until now.
Driveclub has long been touted as the ultimate PS Plus game. It has a large budget, looks great, and was supposed to be mostly free to PS Plus subscribers. In a way, Sony has used it to justify its requirement of PS Plus to play online on the PS4. Free AAA games? How can you argue with an affordable $50/year for all this?
Some investigation by NeoGAF user alr1ght makes it clear that if you decide to upgrade your PS Plus version of Driveclub to the full game, you’ll completely lose access to the title if you decide to stop paying for PS Plus. Basically, your PS Plus subscription holds your $50 purchase hostage.
Most PS4 gamers are fine with paying the PS Plus fee, so this shouldn’t be a problem in their case. However, there’s no way around it, this move goes against everything Sony has stood for during the last year.
We learned last week that Driveclub‘s PS Plus version isn’t even close to being the sizeable chunk of the game promised during last E3. Instead of being the “mostly free AAA game” that it’s been hyped as to PS4 owners, PS Plus subscribers get a demo of sorts, which includes less than 10% of the game. Want the rest? Prepare to fork over $50 and stay a continued subscriber to PS Plus until the day you die.
Sony is already catching a huge amount of flak for this, so I’m reasonably confident it will readjust its position in the short term future.
