PlaySta­tion Plus
© 2010, Sony

Dur­ing E3 Sony announced that it will launch a new pre­mium sub­scrip­tion ser­vice called PlaySta­tion Plus on June 29th. The PlaySta­tion Net­work as we know it will still be free to join and all the cur­rent fea­tures will remain free. PlaySta­tion Plus expands on the ser­vice already in place and offers loads of con­tent to sub­scribers. Start­ing on June 29th Sony will offer a one year or 90-day mem­ber­ship from PlaySta­tion Store.

As an incen­tive they throw in a full copy of Lit­tleBig­Planet if you sign up for a one year mem­ber­ship between June 29th and August 3rd. The one year sub­scrip­tion will be avail­able for €49.99 while three months will cost you €14.99. What do we get for our money?

Sony says that mem­bers will get their hands on at least four games a month at no extra charge. That sounds good but the four games will be com­prised of one PSN game, two minis and one PS one clas­sics. Sub­scribers also get pre­mium avatars and dynamic themes each month as well as dis­counts on loads of PlaySta­tion Store con­tent. The dis­counts will change each month as well.

The pre­mium fea­ture also allows for full game tri­als. Mem­bers can down­load a full copy of a game and play it for a cer­tain amount of time as if they owned it. The time­frame depends on the game but you should have approx­i­mately one hour to check out the game. If you decide to buy the game, your progress and tro­phies will all be unlocked so there’s no need to start again.

The most use­ful perk, how­ever, seems to be what Sony calls auto­matic down­load. Sub­scribers can set their PS3 to auto­mat­i­cally receive game and firmware updates, and down­load game demos. All you have to do is to set the time when you want to receive them and your PS3 will wake up and down­load every­thing. That sounds really use­ful to me.

Check out PlaySta­tion Plus and see for your­self. You need at least ver­sion 3.40 of the PS3 sys­tem soft­ware to make it work. I think that’s just what I need. Per­haps updates will get a bit faster then.