Playstation Plus & Deals: What you might be missing out on

(This is very useful for anyone with a PS4 and a PS3)

Being a Playstation Plus subscriber since it’s inception, I’ve seen how it’s changed for better and worse. Originally it was an optional fee, which gave you a handful of games each month for free which you could play as much as you wanted, if you kept paying your subscription. These games at the time were usually quite good and if I recall correctly there was at least 1 full-game title each month, as well as all of the discounts. A lot of people complain about PS+ nowadays as it usually offers smaller games from lesser known studios, a lot of which are their first games to be launched on the Playstation platform. I think this is a good thing though as it gives games a global audience for at least a month, some of which might get a much smaller audience without PS+. These indie games can also be just as fun as any other AAA game; Rocket League is a huge success, BroForce is great fun with 3 friends, Shovel Knight is beautifully made. But if you’re like me, who owns a PS4 and a PS3 (which rarely gets used anymore) you might be missing out on a huge amount of deals.

The Playstation Store on PS4 consoles can be…challenging to use for any task. I’m still not sure what the thought process was for a search feature as poor as it is, but it looks like their sticking with it. Anyway, it’s even worse on PS3 due to almost-unusable lag. But the PS4 store is lacking in size, particularly for PS3 games. A filter is available in the store to set the results to PS3, but this only returns a handful of results compared to what’s available on the Store via a web browser. Case in point below, where I have the PS Plus Exclusive Discounts page opened in a browser and on my PS4, both filtered to PS3 results only.

(Note – Mass Efect 2, 3 and the Trilogy in the picture above are all PS3 ONLY)

From what I can gather, it seems that the PS4 Store only shows PS3 games that are ALSO playable on PS4 too, therefore excluding all other PS3-only games. This works best for Sony, but not the multiplatform consumer – nobody accidentally buys a PS3 game from the PS4 store and then can’t play it, and Sony doesn’t have to deal with that problem ever again. I admittedly done this before, but it wasn’t a problem as I had both consoles anyway. But this forces many people like myself to use the web browser instead to find some of the BEST deals on PS3 games, ideally I should be able to do all this from the PS4 and a big warning should stop the purchase telling me that it’s PS3 only or something.

Another thing that I’m baffled about the Store is the missing Price Drop section which is viewable only in a web browser. This bundles all of the various drops, such as the EA giveaway, Digital Discount etc. but also includes some other deals that aren’t in any other section too. The best deals nowadays are to be had on PS3, with full games getting huge discounts off them very regularly. But, because I spend the majority of my time on my PS4, and the discounts on PS3 aren’t advertised much, you never really hear about them each month. EA’s listings on PS3 this month are unbelievable; Battlefield 4 and Hardline for €5, Bejeweled 3 for €5, Burnout Paradise for €4 and the DLC is next to nothing, and all of the Dead Space games for the same prices too.

I think an option for at least viewing PS3 deals from a PS4 needs to be added as I know many gamers in the same situation with both consoles, who didn’t even know about the monthly PS+ games for PS3, again which can only be seen from a PS3 or web browser! Let me know if you think it’s a good idea to give greater visibility to PS3 titles on PS4.