Playstation Plus questions

sesselpupser

sesselpupser

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neema_t
So I noticed that PS+ members recently got a load of free games, some pretty good ones. I've always been a little bit curious about Plus but never enough to actually buy it, but this seems almost too good to pass up. Naturally, this means I have some questions that I can't find the answers to elsewhere.

First of all, if I were to buy Plus now, would I be able to get those games, or is this like the ApocalyPS3 apology thing where you had to be a member before a certain date?

Secondly, does anyone know if this is a strictly one-off thing for E3 or if it'll happen more often? And will the offer expire at the end of the month?

Thirdly, and I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to this; if you pay for Plus, download loads of free stuff and then your Plus membership expires, do you get to keep the stuff? I'm guessing not, right? Part two to that, if it expires and you lose access, if you start paying again after a while are you still able to access that free stuff even if a new member wouldn't be able to because of the offer expiring or something of that nature?

One final one; is it worth it? £40 per year isn't THAT much, really, there are certainly worse deals around that I've sprung for in the past (BF3 premium being one...). However my PS3 is just a GT5 machine now and I've pretty much stopped playing that because of my triple monitor PC racing setup. I'd like a Motorstorm game and LBP2 would be quite fun, and 'free' (it's not truly free, it's just extremely cheap really) stuff is always good.
 
neema_t
First of all, if I were to buy Plus now, would I be able to get those games, or is this like the ApocalyPS3 apology thing where you had to be a member before a certain date?
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If you subscribe now, the games are still available for download, so yes you can get them.

Secondly, does anyone know if this is a strictly one-off thing for E3 or if it'll happen more often? And will the offer expire at the end of the month?
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The initial batch of games will expire in about a months time, there will then be another 3 games released, where 3 of the original games will disapear. In another 1 month or so another 3 games will come available and so on...


Thirdly, and I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to this; if you pay for Plus, download loads of free stuff and then your Plus membership expires, do you get to keep the stuff? I'm guessing not, right? Part two to that, if it expires and you lose access, if you start paying again after a while are you still able to access that free stuff even if a new member wouldn't be able to because of the offer expiring or something of that nature?
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If you download free stuff, the majority will become unavailable to use when your subscription ends. If you wait 6 months or 2 years and resubscribe your items will then become available again.

If you buy anything using the PS+ discount, that stuff is yours to keep forever, whether your subscription is current or not.

One final one; is it worth it? £40 per year isn't THAT much, really, there are certainly worse deals around that I've sprung for in the past (BF3 premium being one...). However my PS3 is just a GT5 machine now and I've pretty much stopped playing that because of my triple monitor PC racing setup. I'd like a Motorstorm game and LBP2 would be quite fun, and 'free' (it's not truly free, it's just extremely cheap really) stuff is always good.
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Yes!

From the EU Playstation Blog

You’re still going to get exclusive dynamic themes, avatars and access to beta trials – in fact we’ve got some truly fantastic betas coming before the end of the year for you.
Then, there are the games. From now on, the watchwords are more and better. More new games, more digital Blu-ray, more of the very best the PlayStation®Store can provide.
You’re getting 10 games up front and from next month, 3 of those games will change, and you’ll get at least 3 games per month thereafter.
The important thing is that whenever you decide to join PlayStation®Plus, there will be a minimum of 10 games for you to start playing right away.
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^Yes to all he said.

And yes totally worth it.

I show you:

In 2 year I got:
72 full Ps3 games (not all retail, some PSN)
44 Minis (it's probably more, but i did not download them all or deleted some)
2 Neo geo
2 Old games
22 PS1 games
1 Ps2 game

There might be months were i forgot to download, but for a 100 bucks that is quite some amount of games you get to play

And needless to say, I don't even have enough time to play through them all:scared::dopey::sly:
 
I've had it since Christmas and gotten my money's worth already. I'm NA though so different games but I've got Space Marine 40k, LBP 2, Far Cry 2, Trine 2, Shift 2, and Sly 1. Those are just the games I actually have downloaded and played there are plenty more I passed on and I've only had it 6 months. The other thing I really like is the auto updates. Between 4-6 am I have my ps3 automatically check for updates and it downloads them automatically. That includes patches for all games I've played which is awesome. So it's very rare for me to have to wait for a patch when I turn on a game.

Anyway if you enjoy a wide variety of games it's worth it. I've tried out some games I wouldn't have otherwise and I've also used to the Playstation plus discount a few times as well on stuff like Assassin's Creed II which I got for $7 and Crysis which was $7.50.
 
Not forgetting the cloud storage for game saves. It's only 150mb, but you can have the saves automatically uploaded in the previously mentioned automatic update setting.

For £40, if you play a bit of PS3, it's a no brainer.
 
Well you certainly have me convinced! Thanks guys, you've just cost me £40 and probably the price of a bigger HDD.
 
dhandes
Couldn't resist.
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Impetuous boy! (Ah well, who wants to live forever? HAHAHAHA)


Ok one more question. Now that I'm a Plus subscriber, is there any way I can make my PS3 do the automatic download thing to finish off paused downloads overnight or can I only make it download recommended games?
 
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^somewhere in the settings is a postition for that. You can choose when the PS3 should do it.

And automatic cloud saves are nice too, especially if you have multiple ps3
 
neema_t
Well you certainly have me convinced! Thanks guys, you've just cost me £40 and probably the price of a bigger HDD.
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That is the main reason I've not got plus, with a 60gb PS3 with about 4gb of space left, I just wouldn't get my money's worth. It's probably to late in the PS3's life span to bother with changing the HD now too.:)
 
^ Same, I still have my 60GB in my PS3 and its so late in the day now there's no real point in changing it. Trying to manage the few GB left on it is quite a challenge though!

Plus would be a good idea if you could keep what you get given for free, removing them after its over just sound likes rental to me so technically its not free. They have done this just to hook people in to rolling over the subscription year after year.

Also I don't think £40 is worth it because you could get a brand new AAA game rather than being given 1 year to play a few 3-4 year old games. I don't consider PSN games full PS3 games so how many retail PS3 games do they give over a year?
 
Wait...so you think $50 for one AAA title that could possibly give you 12 hours or less of enjoyment is a better deal than $50 for, depending on your views, at least 4 decent titles that could more than double the playing time of one title? Who the hell cares if they're a couple years old, they're still 80+ on Metacritic. It's not worth it if you have 3 or 4 of those title already or you don't play the PS3 very often, but that's about it. The value for the money is far greater than any single title, unless it's a 40-60+ hour game. And that's not even taking into account the games that will show up throughout the year and discounts on DLC and other things.

And how many of those AAA $60 titles are you even playing one year later? An FPS maybe, a sports game if you don't buy them yearly, maybe something with addictive multiplayer.
 
Icarus25
Wait...so you think $50 for one AAA title that could possibly give you 12 hours or less of enjoyment is a better deal than $50 for, depending on your views, at least 4 decent titles that could more than double the playing time of one title? Who the hell cares if they're a couple years old, they're still 80+ on Metacritic. It's not worth it if you have 3 or 4 of those title already or you don't play the PS3 very often, but that's about it. The value for the money is far greater than any single title, unless it's a 40-60+ hour game. And that's not even taking into account the games that will show up throughout the year and discounts on DLC and other things.

And how many of those AAA $60 titles are you even playing one year later? An FPS maybe, a sports game if you don't buy them yearly, maybe something with addictive multiplayer.
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I usually play my games through quite slowly, I'm still playing AAA PS3 games I bought years ago and even some PS2 games.

I agree with you about the extra hours of enjoyment, I was talking about it from purely financial point because most of the games they offer for free (or rather rental) can be picked up from a store for like $10 each which you then own forever and you have a physical copy. So its not the massive money saver its being made out to be.

Also discounts on DLC and PSN games don't really interest me which is why its not something I'd subscribe to.
 
I guess it depends on the person because when I'm done with a game I rarely if ever come back to it. Definitely worth it in my opinion for the exact reasons outlined above. It's only the cost of 1 new game or 2 older decent ones so that's not bad at all. And last I checked LBP2 and Space Marine 40k can't be found for $10.
 
Europe got Infamous 2 for free. That's still 35€.

Sure no physical copy, but the games I like I buy them straight on release.

And you can download the games years after you got them again, and if you still suscribed you can still play them.

and some games I got over ps+ that I wouldn't have bought were really fun.
 
Quick question. I'm thinking of getting PSN+ on my US account (it's cheaper on the US and my dad's there atm). Will I be able to play the games on my main NZ account or are they restricted to the US account?
 
I really have no idea, you'd hope it works the same as any other game but it's hard to say.


As for the value, it's not for everyone of course but £40 a year for 3 'free' games a month is pretty good going in my opinion, but I have a backlog of games so long that I forget what I own so I'm not likely to play games that I've finished again. Being able to preview games is a great addition too, except I think that'll cost me more than it saves me because I was ambivalent about Red Dead Redemption before I played it, now I really want it (eventually)...
 
Just to be safe. Manage your account and make sure that PSN doesn't automatically renew itself since that's the default option.
 
I find PS+ to be awesome value, but then I like indie games and minis too. I hope they aren't gonna *only* offer A-list games from now on, though I notice Chime is part of the current package.

Word of warning though, it is definitely worth having or getting a good-sized HDD for the amount of content you'll need to store. Don't forget download games access everything from your drive, there's no disc carrying some of the content. Infamous 2 alone weighed in at 10GB, and i've managed to fill my 120GB HDD with probably 90% PS+ stuff. Just got a nice new 500GB drive though, just putting off swapping it out :)

One query I have though, and I hope someone can help out with this. Whilst I know if membership lapses you are locked out of the free games you downloaded until you re-subscribe, is it also safe to delete games temporarily? In other words, if a game is available for free, I download it, then at a later date delete it to make some space, can I still download that game for free again, even if it is no longer one of the free titles currently offered? Obviously it would at least need to still be available in some form at the PS store (well I assume so)

Oh one more quite nice thing about PS+ that no one mentioned, there are quite a few trials/playable demos available to PS+ owners only, although many of these unfortunately seem to be of the timed variety, or worse still, the "play once" 1 hour demos EA seem to like doing. Still, nice though, just don't start the demo up at all until you have that hour to spare!
 
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You can redownload any game as long as you started downloading it once. If you go into download list under account management you can redownload anything you have previously.
 
Thanks, well worth knowing, although wish i'd known that before they took Infamous 2 off, as I never downloaded it, was just resigned to not having enough space, and at that point didn't have a new HDD! I did download all the other recent games at various times though, to try out which ones I wanted the most, so it's nice to know that a couple of these I can get again (that fighting game was OK and I think has gone now)
 
I told the PSN store to download Deus Ex: HR but it told me I didn't have enough disk space, yet the icon in the store changed to say I'd 'bought' it anyway so I think it's in my downloads list for future reference. It's not really that important as I have it on PC anyway but if it's free... Have you checked your downloads list to see if Infamous 2 is there?

Edit: Yep, just checked, Deus Ex is in my downloads list even though when I tried to download it, it came up with a warning about insufficient disk space.
 
Yeah that was my point, Infamous 2 was the only game where I didn't download it or even attempt to, all the others I did! Still, I haven't played Infamous 1 yet (got it with the PSN welcome back thing) so if I like that, number 2 should be pretty inexpensive. Did play a demo of the first some time ago, seemed pretty cool but didn't really blow me away.
 
Tyger
Yeah that was my point, Infamous 2 was the only game where I didn't download it or even attempt to, all the others I did! Still, I haven't played Infamous 1 yet (got it with the PSN welcome back thing) so if I like that, number 2 should be pretty inexpensive. Did play a demo of the first some time ago, seemed pretty cool but didn't really blow me away.
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Oh sorry, I thought you meant you tried to download it but didn't have the room. I haven't tried Infamous 2 yet because I'm 'in the middle of' the first (I really have no idea how far through I am) but it isn't really grabbing me either, it's just a bit repetitive.
 
Searched and found this thread. Asking this question just to be 100% sure. (AKA my OCD is making me do this)

I just got a Plus card, and a few free games stop being free on Tuesday. If I download them and delete them, can I download them later even after they're out of the store?
 
ParkourVeyron
Searched and found this thread. Asking this question just to be 100% sure. (AKA my OCD is making me do this)

I just got a Plus card, and a few free games stop being free on Tuesday. If I download them and delete them, can I download them later even after they're out of the store?
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Yeah, all you have to do is start downloading then make sure its added to your downloads list. Even if your HDD is full you'll get an error saying so, but the game is still added, which is very nice.
 
It's a pretty good thing to do if you don't have a huge amount of HDD space left. For example, I'm not gonna play the Minis or PS1 Classics, so I cancelled them as soon as I started the download. This means that I can DL them, play them and delete them when needed.
 

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