Sony has a service for Playstation 3, 4, and Vita called PlayStation Plus, wherein you can download, on average, 2 free games every month. You can play these games for as long as you’re subscribed to the service. At $10 per month, that’s not a bad deal. I picked up Rocket League, a game available for $19.99 normally, for free through PS Plus, and played it quite a bit. Being subscribed to PS Plus has really opened me up to games and genres I might not normally play, without the sometimes restrictive price tag.
However…
I always feel a juvenile sense of guilt when I play a PS Plus game as opposed to a retail purchase; as though I’m doing a disservice by not playing a game I paid $60 for. Thus begins the cycle of downloading a new PS Plus game, falling in love with the screen shots, then the honeymoon wears off after it downloads; leaving me feeling dirty, like I started a new save file without telling my other save files.
So then these games just sit in my library. Every time I pass by them I think to myself “I should really play that sometime.”, and that’s enough to put it to the back of my mind. However, as of this writing, I have around 12 games that I have either never played, played once and never saved, or played once and vowed to “really dig into this…when I have more time.”
I think that’s a defining characteristic of a ‘gamer’. We all have a varying amount of free time, so when we get free time, we want to maximize the value of it. The problem is that when we buy a game, we feel a connection to it. We worked to make money, then traded that money for this game that we’ve researched, fallen in love with, and pined over. Now that we have it, it’s hard to imagine not extracting every bit of fun out of it in lieu of a ‘free game’.
Only two PS Plus games have really been able to crack my regular rotation. Rocket League got my attention largely due to the game being an absolute blast to play, and also due to hearing people rave about it online. Counterspy was another game that really got it’s hooks into me. The randomized levels, clever combat system, and frantic scramble when you’ve been discovered all combined to make an incredibly fun game. But before, and since, then no other games have really come in and stole the show these two gems.
But maybe I’m thinking about it from the wrong perspective. The tag of ‘free game’ cheapens the work put into them by the many talented people developing the game. I should count myself lucky that I was a subscriber at the right time to take advantage of these games. Maybe I should just take a day or two, and really give all these games the time they need to shine. Maybe I’ll find another diamond in the rough on PlayStation Plus.