All PS Plus Deluxe Members in Korea Get a Free Upgrade as Cloud Streaming

I think Sony’s commitment to cloud gaming remains a footer for most PlayStation enthusiasts, but its PS Plus Premium solution is actually pretty good.

Based on my own experiences, the image quality and latency is up there with the best services from the likes of Nvidia, and most games support it now – either ones in your digital game library or part of the PS Plus catalogue.

I know a lot of countries still don’t have access to the technology, though, so I think it’s pertinent to point out that the service is arriving in Korea next week, from 28th October.

Sony is also doing right by its subscribers: it’s upgrading all PS Plus Deluxe members to PS Plus Premium for free. This means the cloud services will be added to their existing memberships at no extra cost.

To be fair, there probably aren’t many active PS Plus Deluxe members in Korea to upgrade – this is a bespoke version of the service which just includes retro games on top of the existing PS Plus Extra perks. It’s not really good value without the cloud streaming.

One thing worth pointing out is that the Korean infrastructure will only support PS5 games, so there’s no compatibility with PS3 or even PS4 titles like in the UK and USA. I can understand not having instances of the PS3 available, but I’m surprised it can’t offer PS4 support via backwards compatibility.

Nevertheless, the manufacturer says 1,000s of games will be compatible, and there are no hourly rates or usage limitations. That’s worth mentioning, as Microsoft rolls out its “pay to play” tiers.

It’ll be interesting to see whether cloud streaming sees an uptick in consumer interest with hardware costs rising. My personal opinion is that it works well for certain types of games – like visual novels and JRPGs – but it’s not great for action-focused titles.

I’m also not sure how the economics work for the organisations involved. The infrastructure must be expensive to operate, and it places a lot of the cost on the service provider, which I assume doesn’t scale well.

Still, it’s cool to see Sony continue to quietly invest in this area; it proves the company remains committed to the technology, over a decade after it bought start-up Gaikai to get its foot in the door.