Sony has announced what players can expect in June, July, and August, essentially revealing what the highest-paying subscribers will receive as their extra bonus.
Sony Interactive Entertainment usually announces the PlayStation Plus Essential tier games on the Wednesday before the first Monday of a new month. Those games are also available to PlayStation Plus Extra and PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers. Then there is the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog, which is only available at the Extra and Premium tiers. Sony typically announces those games, along with the PlayStation Plus Classics Catalog titles available at the highest tier, two or three weeks in advance. This time, however, something unusual happened.
Sony only announced the PlayStation Plus Classics Catalog titles, and it did so for June, July, and August at once. The problem is that for a long time now, Sony has handled this tier by adding just one game to the catalog each month. It would be hard to do worse, because if there were no additions at all in a given month, subscribers would certainly speak up. Still, one game per month is a fairly ridiculous offering for the most expensive tier, which should provide more than that.
Sony has announced that three PlayStation 2 games will join the lineup. Gitaroo Man arrives in June, Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy follows in July, and Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams lands in August. Since it is difficult to imagine Sony suddenly deciding to expand the Classics lineup with more than one game per month, we have effectively learned what this tier will offer for the summer. That leaves the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog as the only real source of novelty, though even there, the number of games appears to be trending downward. The question is whether this will ever move in a better direction.
We know we are critical of the subscription service, but Sony still lags behind Microsoft when it comes to transparency. Sony still does not openly list the games leaving the service in its blog posts. That should be a basic expectation.
