So I’ve mentioned a few times that we’re needing to tighten our belts here at chez Dragonchasers. Lots of vet bills and just that generally the cost of living is going up way faster than my salary is means the years of easy living are behind us, at least for now.

So when I noticed my PlayStation Plus Premium membership was coming up for renewal in July, I had a moment of panic. The Premium tier is roughly $160/year, the Extra tier $135 and the Essential tier is $80.

I’m currently on the Premium tier and would not renew it. The difference between Extra and Premium is that the latter offers some game trials, access to old-ass PS1 and PS2 games, and game streaming. I’ve never used any of these perks.

The Extra tier has a Game Pass-like library of games you can play for free while you are subscribed. I do use this quite a bit. While Sony isn’t nearly as good as Microsoft when it comes to putting their own games in the library (and particularly not on Day 1), there are still a lot of good games in the there.

The Essential tier is in fact essential if you want to play games with other people. It is basically the “old” PS+: you get a couple of ‘free’ games every month, cloud saves, and the ability to play games online with other people.

I was looking at $135 for the Extra tier, which is a lot right now, and to add salt to that wound Sony is currently running a 30% discount on subscriptions…but only to people who aren’t subscribed. That just feels bad.

So I initially resigned myself to scraping up $80 for Essential but then I thought about the last time I’d played anything online with anyone and… couldn’t remember when that was. Cloud Saves are nice but I can live without them. And the ‘free’ games that give out these days are generally either very old or not great. The good stuff they save for the Extra tier.

In the end I decided to cancel and see how it felt to be an ‘offline’ PlayStation gamer. First thing I did was go through all the games I had installed and started deleting PS+ Extra titles that I knew I’d have no time to play between now and mid-July. A few of them that I hadn’t tried, I dipped into to see if they were worth adding to my Wishlist in case they ever went on a deep discount.

What was strange about this process was that with every game I deleted, I felt a little bit ‘lighter’. I didn’t realize how much I was feeling “obligated” to take advantage of the PS+ Extra library in order to get my money’s worth. I mean I was vaguely aware of the fact that I have a lot of games on PlayStation that I own but never get around to because I wanted to play the PS+ Extra games first. Thing is, there’s always new PS+ Extra games landing so I can never get ahead of that.

So now, once PS+ Extra is gone, I can go back and play all the games that I was interested enough in to open my wallet for. And I’m actually looking forward to that and I have enough games to keep me busy for a year, easily. Maybe more. You know how slow I am and the PS shares time with the Xbox and PC.

Come November and Black Friday, if they offer another big discount to ‘new’ subs I might go back; I’ll see if I am missing the service by then. I kind of doubt it.

It probably helps that I also have Xbox Game Pass so I get new/random games to play there, too. I don’t feel the same sense of obligation on Xbox. I’m guessing this is partially because I am paid up through 2027, partially because I mostly pay for it via Microsoft Rewards points, and partially because I don’t own a ton of Xbox games that I never get the time to play.

So yeah, I guess that’s it. I went from feeling bad about losing this service to feeling better. I’ve kind of felt a little bit of the same feeling as I’ve canceled streaming services, too. Too much of a good thing, I guess. Having fewer choices is actually making me a little bit happier (and a little bit less broke).

[Image at the top of the post generated by a couple of AI tools. Sora was used initially with the prompt “Can you create a playful illustration of a dump truck labeled “PS +” dumping a bunch of games into an overflowing vat labeled “Backlog”? Please create it in a landscape orientation.” That resulted in the image to the left: Sora does not like making landscape images, apparently. So I fed the original image into Google’s AI Studio and asked it to expand the picture with the prompt “Can you take this image and remake it in a 16:9 ratio? I need it to be wider than it is tall, but otherwise I really like this image.”]