Each month, subscribers to Sony’s PlayStation Plus service are granted many perks including online gaming and free games. Sony will always give away a minimum of two free games to PlayStation Plus subscribers, but quite often it is more, and has been as many as five titles in some previous months.
The free games that are given away can range from first and third-party releases and even some being day one launches, such as Worms Rumble and Oddworld: Soulstorm. Sony has also given away free games in the past as part of other events, such as the Play At Home event that took place during the early stages of lockdown in 2020, with a second event happening in March 2021.
A Reddit user has compiled a list of all the games that were given away during the Play At Home event in March 2021 and compared the Metacritic scores to the games that were given away to paid PlayStation Plus subscribers between January and March 2022. The Play At Home event was introduced in March 2020 to all PlayStation users, regardless of whether they had an active PlayStation Plus subscription, to give them something to play during lockdown to encourage people to stay at home.
The most interesting thing to note from the image is all of the games from the Play At Home event have a “generally favorable” review score. This means that the game has a score of between 75 and 89, with the lowest score of the free games being 78 and the highest being 90, which puts Astro Bot: Rescue Mission into the “universal acclaim” category.
This is compared to the games that required a paid PlayStation Plus membership, which of the 10 that have been given away so far, only five have “generally favorable” reviews and two have “mixed” reviews, although it is worth noting that three games don’t have scores attached. When averaged out, the free Play At Home games have an average Metacritic score of 84.2, whereas the PlayStation Plus games have an average score of just 78.
With the revamp coming to the PlayStation Plus service in June 2022, a comparison such as this will make some players understandably question whether the price increase will be worth it as the quality of what is on offer seems to be decreasing when compared to previous years. It is worth noting that the lowest tier subscription, PlayStation Plus Essential, will remain the same price and be the same as what is on offer now without the extra PlayStation Now and other perks.
