PlayStation Plus, Subscription, and Region Lock

by Rian

All three major console platforms offer some sort of subscription at this point, and PlayStation, if I recall correctly, was the earliest to adopt the subscription requirements for multiplayer experience. What this means for anyone living abroad is they need to make a decision that will stick unlike no other. Currently Sony has a yearly plan for Essential tier of PlayStation Plus, which is $79.99 per year. “PlayStation Plus” is the name of the subscription, and the Essential is the name of the cheapest one available. Don’t worry, it gets even more confusing.

The “Essential” tier is really just about what it sounds like. It covers monthly free games, multiplayer access, and cloud storage for save data backups. What’s compounding the confusion is how the PlayStation console operates in most homes. You can technically play multiplayer games without an active subscription, if there is an account on the same console that already has one. It’d make sense for a household with multiple gamers; it works as a pseudo family plan. But what about the automatic backup? Wouldn’t that be the biggest selling point that speaks to most consumers? It isn’t included. You need a separate subscription. Makes you wonder why Sony isn’t taking a peak on, say, Apple’s playbook for iCloud storage. Why are we paying for backup features?

For gamers who have accounts in different regions like myself, it also begs the question of price. “Essential” tier is currently priced at $79.99 per year in North America, however, no thanks to the political disturbance in South Korea, the same tier is priced at ₩ 60,000 per year, roughly $42 at the time of the piece, or to put it in more real perspective in the eyes of someone living here, almost double. I understand that Sony was blindsided by the political crisis, but this isn’t the first time international pricing models for subscriptions came under fire. South Korean PlayStation Store is known for its issues, but we are talking about the “subscription” itself; unless the free game of the month happens to coincide with the game that is barred from publishing in South Korea, the selection and availability of games are not the question on hand. It’s the fact that players in one region is paying nearly double the price for multiplayer access and automatic backup to the same network. (note: they can access different regions in-game regardless of account region)

What caught me off guard, in the end, was none other than save datas. Unless you have specified for save datas on cloud to be downloaded manually, —Sony doesn’t offer the option to download after the subscription expires— you will lose access to that data. If your subscription is not tied to the account that made that save data, (i.e. save data is tied with an account that created it) you will not get that save data back. So the process I went ahead was this: 1. download all save datas from the expiring account going back to PS4 era, 2. copy all data to an external storage for safe keeping, 3. and hopefully when the subscription runs out on American account, I would be using South Korean one. Yeah, try explaining this to anyone who is not acquainted with gaming. They might as well just pay the double, heck, they might buy two subscriptions from the sound of it.