Playstation Plus

For years now Microsoft has had the market cornered on the console online experience. Lets face it, the infrastructure of X-Box Live is amazing. It has a great interface and really offers a lot to its users. Sony countered this by offering their online services for free from the get go when the Playstation Network was created. Fast forward about four years and Sony has finally introduced a subscription based system for their online service. However there is a difference and as a recent subscriber to a 3 month plan of Playstation Plus, I can shed some light on those differences.

Now I've been part of X-Box Live for over 6 years. I remember back when it was filled with those adrenaline junkie teen gamers playing Halo 2 all the time. Wait..X-Box Live is still like that. But I digress, you're paying a price for the most basic of functions in an online experience as well as the premium services. Granted, the monthly access charges aren't that much. I justify it by buying one less game per year and bam, online access on X-Box Live. Access to betas, demos, arcade games, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM and Netflix. Yes, X-Box offers quite a lot to it's subscribers.

Enter Playstation Plus: a great expansion on the PSN experience. The key difference between the two services is that the core of PSN remains free to users who don't want to pay. This means that online play remains free of charge, whereas with X-Box Live you must subscribe in order to play online with your friends. Now with Playstation Plus, you have even more extras to add to the PSN. Right off the bat I was able to enjoy a 60 minute trial of inFamous, a game I've been wanting to play since I got my PS3 in December. I was pretty much hooked on it too and plan to pick it up soon. Even better is that with the service you can some seriously discounted goods in the PSN store. Avatars get knocked down from a small micro-transaction to free. The same can be said of some game add-ons and arcade games.  As of this writing there's even a Hulu Plus app for the PS3 that I'm taking advantage of as part of the Hulu Plus beta. And there's still promises of more features such as automatic downloads; setting your PS3 to wake and download updates or demos and install them without having to worry about it. 

With such a robust set of features I really think Playstation can start to give X-Box Live a run for it's money. But they have a long way to go and catch up to Microsoft. The race is definitely getting closer though. Let me know your thoughts if you've subscribed to PS Plus.