January’s PS Now And PS Plus Games Have Been Announced, Including Persona 5 Strikers

Sony has officially announced the games being added to PS Now and PS Plus as of tomorrow. The former adds Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age and Mortal Kombat 11, while the latter includes Persona 5 Strikers.

PS Now, Sony’s game streaming subscription service, adds six new games tomorrow. They be:

• Mortal Kombat 11
• Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age
• Fury Unleashed
• Unturned
• Super Time Force Ultra
• Kerbal Space Program: Enhanced Edition

Meanwhile, the increasingly anachronistic PS Plus adds three new games for subscribers to download this month. This is them:

• Persona 5 Strikers
• Dirt 5
• Deep Rock Galactic

A fine selection, all told, with Deep Rock Galactic making its PlayStation debut. But as each month goes by, Sony’s offering feels more and more confusing, given a) how the two services now severely overlap, and b) neither seems an adequate answer to Microsoft’s Game Pass.

As someone who was late to PS4, I remember being enormously confused even then by these two different subscription services offered for the same machine. This is something that’s become even more bewildering given last year’s enormous improvements to PS Now, now offering 1080p streaming, but more significantly, allowing subscribers to download about half of the catalogue.

Where PS Now was once streaming only, and PS Plus a handful of downloadable “freebies” (no longer yours if you cease your monthly tithe), the two now significantly encroach on each other’s territory. Given that Now allows you to download almost all the available PS2 and PS4 games to your machine, it starts to feels far more like Game Pass—until you notice that only three games from 2021 are available to play locally.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is adding buckets of new, downloadable games to Game Pass every month, including a frankly weird number of day-one releases, making both of Sony’s offerings feel utterly stingy. However, Now has many hundreds of available games, dwarfing Microsoft’s catalogue…

See! Confusing!

Rumors are rife that Sony are finally going to react to Microsoft’s game of giveaway chicken, sensibly combining the two services into one, and using the better understood brand of PS Plus to title it. That definitely seems the right choice, given that Now has been offering a half-decent rival to Game Pass for almost six months, and not enough people have noticed.

In the meantime, we’ve yet another month in which Sony offers us a measly three new games to download, while Microsoft dishes out more than that each time it sneezes.