It’s a new month, which means Sony’s adding another crop of games to its PlayStation Plus vault for Extra and Premium subscribers. There are some good additions here, including Dishonored and Doom Eternal. But, as the saying goes, out with the old and in with the new: Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-Man is poised to get dropped from the PS Plus Game Catalogue in May.
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PlayStation Plus is Sony’s subscription service that gives you access to a plethora of games for a monthly fee. With three different tiers — Essential for $AU11.95 per month, Extra for $AU18.95 per month, and Deluxe for $AU21.95 per month (Australia doesn’t the US’ Premium tier or its cloud streaming platform) — you can play an assortment of new and old first- and third-party games, from God of War to Ghostwire: Tokyo. The list is vast, with a new set of games getting added every month.
Separate from its monthly base PS Plus offerings, Sony announced April’s additions to its vast Game Catalogue on the PlayStation Blog, which features the aforementioned Dishonored and Doom Eternal, alongside the emotional action-adventure game Kena: Bridge of Spirits, the extreme sports multiplayer sim Riders Republic, and the FPS Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. Tucked away in the post, though, was some fine print about the games leaving the PS Plus Game Catalogue next month, and Marvel’s Spider-Man is one of them.
First-party titles won’t be in PS Plus Game Catalogue forever
Sony said the removal of Marvel’s Spider-Man, alongside NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 and Resident Evil in May, is “part of our normal content refresh” before detailing how players can keep track of what games will leave the service.
“Members with Game Catalogue benefits can still play by May 15. You can always check the ‘Last chance to play section’ on the PlayStation Plus -> Collections page on the PS5 console, or PlayStation Plus -> Games -> Games Catalogue on the PS4 console for titles you might want to play before they leave the service.”
For clarification: Base-level PS Plus members only ever get access to the monthly featured games, whereas those who pay for any of the other tiers get access to PlayStation’s Game Catalogue, which features up to 400 titles. If you have Game Catalogue benefits, you can enjoy Marvel’s Spider-Man and the other games leaving the monthly PS Plus offering until May 15.
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But once May 15 rolls around, the aforementioned games will be removed from the subscription service and you lose access even if you’ve downloaded them. If you want to continue playing, you’ll have to purchase the game directly from the PlayStation Store. This practice of removing popular first-party titles doesn’t bode well for PlayStation fans curious about what the company’s getting up to, especially when compared to Xbox Game Pass, which tends to add and keep first-party games in its vault in perpetuity like Halo Infinite, Minecraft, and top Bethesda titles.
Kotaku reached out to Sony for comment.
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It’s no secret that Sony is averse to adding first-party games to the PS Plus Game Catalogue, with CEO Jim Ryan saying in March 2022 that doing so would diminish the quality of PlayStation’s marquee titles. Meanwhile, Xbox has admitted that Game Pass causes the company to lose money. So, maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised to see Sony eventually pull its first-party games from its subscription service as well, despite how much of a bummer that is.
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