New PS Plus Upgrades Are Already Causing An Uproar

Once again, Sony has upset fans. Earlier this year, PlayStation finally confirmed what we all suspected and announced its plans to bolster its PS Plus subscription service by providing three different tiers to choose from. PlayStation Plus Essential will act exactly as PS Plus has in the past, and at the same price. Meanwhile, PS Plus Extra nets players the additional boost of roughly 400 PS4 and PS5 games to play at $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year, and PS Plus Premium will add the ability to download a host of PS1 and PS2 classics and PS3 titles via streaming for $17.99 a month and $119.99 a year.

People were getting excited for the release of the new tiers on June 13th when Sony quickly blocked subscription stacking. While that confused and upset plenty of players, Sony has incurred the wrath of even more fans in Asia, where the new PS Plus tiers have already gone live. 

As Twitter user and leaker Nibellion pointed out, Asian players have been sharing the incredibly frustrating upgrade process on Reddit. According to these players, upgrading to the new tiers will cost you if your current PS Plus subscription was acquired with a discount. It seems that the fee required to upgrade one's subscription is higher than those who acquired their existing PS Plus subscriptions without a discount rather than being a fixed price for all consumers. While that already sounds rough, things get even worse if you were a player that attempted to stack subscriptions before Sony blocked the ability to do so.

If you want to upgrade your existing PS Plus subscription to the new Extra or Premium tier, you cannot upgrade it for only a month. You must upgrade it for the entire duration of your outstanding PS Plus subscription. Even if said pre-existent subscription is more than a year long, you must pay big bucks to simply upgrade to a new tier. Oof.

Some have pointed out that this may not be how Sony chooses to run the service in North and South America, but even then it's incredibly unfortunate for those living in Asia. Instead of being able to simply test the waters on the new tiers for a month, players will either have to pay huge amounts of money for the upgrade or wait until their current subscriptions run out.