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PS Plus adds two PS5 exclusives in April, but loses Spider-Man next month

Tomas Franzese
By

Sony has revealed the new batch of games coming to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium this month, and it’s a meaty batch including PlayStation exclusives like Kena: Bridge of Spirits and Sackboy: A Big Adventure, as well as several Bethesda titles. Marvel’s Spider-Man, one of PlayStation’s biggest exclusives, will be leaving the service in May.

This is the full list of games coming to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium on April 18:

  • Kena: Bridge of Spirits
  • Sackboy: A Big Adventure
  • Riders Republic
  • Slay the Spire
  • Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom
  • Bassmaster Fishing
  • Paradise Killer
  • The Evil Within
  • Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
  • Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
  • Doom
  • Doom II
  • Doom 64
  • Doom 3
  • Doom Eternal
  • Dishonored: Definitive Ediiton
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Overall, it’s a pretty great month for the service, with lots of critically acclaimed titles. Over half of the games on the list are games published by Bethesda, a company that’s owned by Microsoft. It’s possible that the latter is trying to get as many games onto Sony’s service as it can in order to make itself look as good as possible to the regulators assessing Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition. Still, the end result for players just means that PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium subscribers have a lot of solid Bethesda titles to play.

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Sadly, the blog post for this announcement also highlights some of the titles that will leave these higher tiers of PlayStation Plus on May 15 — and it’s an even lengthier list. In fact, it includes one first-party heavy hitter that is surprising to see leave: Marvel’s Spider-Man. Hopefully, that means the PS5 remaster is coming soon in its place. Here is the full list of titles leaving PS Plus next month: 

  • Marvel’s Spider-Man
  • Marvel’s Spider-Man: Game of the Year Edition
  • TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge 2
  • Tour de France 2021
  • Graveyard Keeper
  • Deadlight: Director’s Cut
  • Homefront: The Revolution 
  • Kona
  • Might No. 9
  • Red Faction Guerrilla: Re-Mars-tered
  • Relicta
  • Shenmue III
  • This War of Mine: The Little Ones
  • Windbound
  • Metro 2033: Redux
  • Metro: Last Light Redux
  • Kingdom Come: Deliverance
  • MX vs. ATV All-Out
  • Chronos: Before the Ashes
  • Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon EVERY BUDDY!
  • Left Alive
  • Star Ocean First Departure R
  • Balan Wonderworld
  • NBA 2K Playgrounds 2
  • Resident Evil remake
  • How to Survive: Storm Warning Edition
  • Pixel Piracy
  • Last Day of June
  • Virginia
  • Dreamfall Chapters
  • Pathfinder: Kingmaker — Definitive Edition

Looking at these lists, it seems like April and May will be very busy months for Sony’s Xbox Game Pass competitor. The new games all come to PS Plus on April 18, while the games leaving the service won’t be on PlayStation Plus Extra or Premium after May 15.

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PlayStation games we want to see added to PS Plus
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It's official: PlayStation Now is dead, and PlayStation Plus is expanding to include everything that service offered in a new tiered subscription model. Aside from the Essential tier, which is functionally identical to PS Plus currently, the Extra and Premium tiers promise to add different amounts of game options for downloading and streaming from the entire history of Sony consoles. The Extra tier only allows downloading of PS4 and PS5 games, but the Premium level has those hundreds of titles, plus a promised catalog of over 300 PS1, PS2, PSP, and PS3 games to stream and download. PS Now had a limited selection of PS2 titles and a decent library of PS3 games, but no PS1 or PSP games at all, which might be the deciding factor for those who want to subscribe to this tier.

The biggest ace Sony has up its sleeve against the competition has always been first-party games. While Sony has expressed many times that it doesn't intend to offer its big first-party games on PS Plus at launch, the PlayStation back catalog is full of amazing titles we would love to be able to play all in one place. Drawing on that history could be another avenue that helps make this new service a success without directly matching its biggest competition, Game Pass.

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Why playing PS3 games on a PS5 is way harder than it sounds
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PlayStation Plus Premium will give players access to a library of classic PlayStation, PS2, and PS3 titles starting this June, which is exciting as the PS5 only is backward compatible with the PS4 currently. Unfortunately, it comes with a caveat: All PS3 games must be streamed from the cloud and can't be played natively on the console.
We're over 15 years removed from the PS3's launch, and there's still no good way to play many classic PS3 titles like Infamous or Metal Gear Solid 4 on modern platforms. Sony is content to continue PlayStation Now's approach to PS3 gaming with PlayStation Plus Premium. This stands out when Xbox and Nintendo are doing a relatively good job at natively emulating or remastering games from older systems for modern platforms.
To learn why PS3 games are so hard to bring to modern consoles, I spoke to Whatcookie, a contributor for the popular PS3 emulator RPCS3. Whatcookie, who chose not to share his name, is also known for creating a 60 frames per second patch for the PS3 version of Demon's Souls. He broke down what makes PS3 emulation particularly frustrating and sheds some light on why Sony is content with streaming PS3 games from the cloud instead.
CELL it
The system architectures of the PS4 and PS5 are so similar that isn't much of a problem to run PS4 titles on Sony's latest system, with a couple of exceptions. Compared to that, the PS3 has a different CPU that has more in common with the PS2 than Sony's modern systems.
In short, PS3's CELL microprocessor had some very unique capabilities, which meant that developers over-relied on the CPU at the time. This approach ultimately makes PS3 games harder to emulate. Whatcookie broke this all down for Digital Trends in greater detail. 

"The Emotion Engine from the PS2 as well as the CELL in the PS3 are both built to do floating point math as fast as possible, to the detriment of other aspects of performance," Whatcookie explains. "The CELL even surpasses the PS4's CPU in terms of floating-point performance but loses out on every other measurable aspect of performance."
The uniquely powerful CPU of the PS3 already makes it an odd system, but the PS3 could also move 128 bytes atomically and had a weaker GPU than the Xbox 360. This combination led to a weird post-processing workaround for developers that Whatcookie called "unfriendly to emulation," where developers would offload post-processing to the CPU.
"This means moving a rendered image from the GPU over to main memory, emulating the post-processing code, and finally moving the image back to the GPU's memory from main memory, where the GPU will draw the UI over the processed image and finally present that image to the screen," Whatcookie says. "This type of round trip is very unfriendly to modern GPUs, where post-processing a 720p image would likely be faster than moving the image to main memory, never mind all the other steps."
These extra steps on a function that developers would usually contain to the GPU make emulation difficult. Still, a large dedicated team at RPCS3 has put in a lot of work to create a functional emulator for modern PCs. According to Whatcookie, it's totally possible to get PS3 emulation working on a PS5.
"The PS5's CPU is a decent deal faster, and combined with the kind of shortcuts that developers of commercial emulators make -- the official PS2 emulator on PS4 has many game-specific patches and hacks -- it should be possible to achieve full speed on whatever games they choose to release."
So why doesn't Sony put in the effort to address these issues and get proper PS3 emulation up and running on PS5?
Just because you can…

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PlayStation Plus Premium needs a stronger selling point
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Sony finally revealed how it's combining PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now, and the reworked service lines up with exactly what we had heard in leaks. So far, we know PlayStation Plus Premium, the highest tier, will offer access to around 700 games that come from almost every PlayStation platform, but Sony has only revealed a small, underwhelming number of titles for the service. On top of that, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan already declared that putting new first-party PlayStation titles on the service on day one is "not a road that we're going to go down with this new service."
Many fans and industry pundits (myself included) have previously compared PlayStation Plus Premium to Xbox Game Pass. While the services are definitely competing as subscription offerings from major console manufacturers, it's clear that Sony doesn't plan to match Microsoft's offerings one-to-one for the time being. With so many question marks around what games will be included, Sony has yet to give players a strong sales pitch for PlayStation Plus Premium.
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With game subscription services, content is king. Xbox Game Pass draws eyes because there are plenty of excellent AAA and indie titles available on the service, many of which are on there day one. Microsoft has managed to make Xbox Game Pass a compelling service that many gamers talk about because the games on it are diverse and intriguing. Currently, PlayStation Plus Premium doesn't elicit that same response.

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