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.
It’s had something of a water-cooler effect for both Playstation and Xbox gamers. Somebody tries a game, enjoys it, tells their friends, and they can try it out themselves for no extra cost at all. Sometimes this simply expands the audience of an already popular game, like Tomb Raider, or Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. But other times it creates great communities around games that would have otherwise been passed by.
Case in point: Rocket League. The concept is so simple: soccer with cars. You drive around the field, rocket-boosting at a giant ball, and try to knock it into the opposing team’s goal. There’s no way that developer Psyonix would have been able to advertise Rocket League and turn it into a success with a $20 barrier-to-entry. But as a Playstation Plus title, the game has been something of a phenomenon. Since Rocket League is built on online play, and Playstation Plus is required for online play, this means that every single PS4 owner who might be interested in Rocket League already has access to the game.
This makes Playstation Plus and Xbox Live Gold terrific opportunities for marketers and lesser-known developers. While they may miss out on a few purchases due to people downloading the game for free, the community and word-of-mouth will drive sales for months to come. Anybody who was not a Playstation Plus subscriber during July, for instance, will not own Rocket League and may want to pick it up later. Psyonix also made a very smart decision in making Rocket League a cross-platform game, so PC owners can play with the PS4 owners. This way, they can leverage the enormous player-base that picked up Rocket League for free and use that as a selling point to get PC players onboard.
The community element has lent something special to Rocket League, as well. Because the title was so completely unknown before release, there’s a sense of discovery to the whole thing, like gamers have just stumbled onto a free gem. It’s almost as if people aren’t supposed to be enjoying this little game as much as they are. This feeling of discovery can be achieved on a personal level as well by simply going through your own built-up library of free games and trying something you’ve never heard of. But when the entire Playstation community is experiencing that same feeling at once, it’s a truly special thing.
There’s still a strong argument to be made against requiring console owners to pay an annual fee for online play, especially given how well-established Xbox Live and PSN are at this point. But, bundled with the free game services, these mandatory subscriptions have bolstered the platform communities in a way I do not believe anybody was expecting. I have no idea when the next Rocket League phenomenon will occur, but the thought that it is out there on the horizon, waiting to be discovered by a huge playerbase, has me very excited.