New PS Plus Premium Games for November 2022 Prove that the PSP is a Black Sheep
Fans were already sold on PS Plus Premium before it was officially revealed, thanks to the promise of access to backwards-compatible PS1, PS2, PSP, and PS3 games. Sony’s PS Plus Extra and Premium add-ons are fantastic, but the service does not (and possibly cannot) provide parity across platforms. For example, the PS3 is famously difficult for developers to work with, yet it’s not the one being shorted in this case thanks to PS Plus. In this case, the PSP will do.
New PS Plus Premium Games for November 2022 Prove that the PSP is a Black Sheep
In celebration of its 10th year in business, Sony has announced that five new Ratchet & Clank PS3 games will be available as part of PS Plus Premium this month. Once they are introduced to PS Plus Collection, just a small number of titles will not be available via the service in some capacity, including Ratchet & Clank 2016, one of the five games now included in PS Plus Collection. The fact that Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is still relatively new makes sense, as do the fact that the mobile games will never be released on a PlayStation system. Ratchet & Clank’s Size Matters and Secret Agent Clank are the only two PSP games not available on PS Plus Premium at the moment.
Both of these titles are crucial to the Ratchet & Clank canon and have received high marks from critics. They aren’t shunned from the brand due of their poor quality, but rather because they were developed only for the PSP. Since the beginning, it has been very evident that Sony is not as dedicated to providing PSP games to the service as it is with other platforms, since Sony has added much less PSP games than other titles. One possible explanation is that the PSP’s library is less than that of competing systems, making it only normal that new games for it would be released at a slower pace. Although this may be the case, the opposite is true if the platform is as easy to use as others.
As things stand, it’s not probable that Sony is at “fault” here. Even though it’s the most challenging system to develop for, the PS3 is still in the “classic” console category. It would be more accurate to call the process of adapting games and controls for the PSP a full-fledged port rather than a simple backwards compatibility hack. If Sony’s efforts to add PSP titles to the PS Plus service are indicative of a broader shift in focus, then the company deserves praise. The strategy is called “the major boss before adds.”
While there may be other contributing variables, it is reasonable to assume that the PSP will remain an outlier so long as PS Plus Premium exists. Sony’s commitment to the PS Plus membership service is shown by the inclusion of this feature.
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