When Sony moved to make Playstation Plus mandatory for Playstation 4 online play, they knew it was going to be an unpopular move. The way they broke the information in the middle of their legendary 2013 E3 presentation was pure industry slight of hand. Playstation fans were too excited about Sony’s big announcements, including the PS4 price point and Sony’s commitment to physical game trading, to pay much attention to a single bullet-point listing “Online Play” as a benefit of Playstation Plus. But after a few days, the fanbase began to catch on, and not everybody was happy that the Playstation Network was now modeling itself off of Microsoft’s Xbox Live.
However, as Microsoft started giving free games to its Xbox Live Gold subscribers and Sony made their free-game service an online subscription, a funny thing happened to both platforms: their communities became stronger. On the Playstation 3, the Plus members were a small subset of the community, and many of the games that were given away for free had been available for years before. But on PS4, where most owners were subscribers out of necessity and the titles given away each month were new, many players found themselves playing the same new games on a monthly basis.