PS Plus Deluxe Members in Korea Receive Free Upgrade as Cloud Streaming Arrives

Image: Push Square

Sony’s commitment to cloud gaming may remain a footnote for most PlayStation enthusiasts, but its PS Plus Premium tier is actually quite strong.

Based on personal experience, image quality and latency rank among the best offered by services from Nvidia and others, and most games now support it—either titles from a digital library or entries within the PS Plus catalogue.

Many countries still lack access to the technology, however, so it is worth noting that the service is arriving in Korea next week, from 28th October.

Sony is also rewarding its subscribers by upgrading all PS Plus Deluxe members to PS Plus Premium for free. This means cloud services will be added to existing memberships at no extra cost.

To be fair, there are likely few active PS Plus Deluxe members in Korea to upgrade—this is a bespoke version of the service that adds retro games on top of the existing PS Plus Extra perks, and it is not particularly good value without cloud streaming.

One thing worth highlighting is that the Korean infrastructure will only support PS5 games, so there is no compatibility with PS3 or even PS4 titles as in the UK and USA. While it is understandable that PS3 instances may be unavailable, it is surprising that PS4 support cannot be offered via backwards compatibility.

Nevertheless, Sony says thousands of games will be compatible, with no hourly rates or usage limitations—worth mentioning as Microsoft rolls out its “pay to play” tiers.

It will be interesting to see whether cloud gaming sees a rise in consumer interest as hardware costs climb. In personal opinion, it works well for certain types of games—such as visual novels and JRPGs—but is not ideal for action-focused titles.

It is also unclear how the economics work for the organisations involved. The infrastructure must be costly to operate, placing much of the burden on the service provider, which does not appear to scale well.

Still, it is encouraging to see Sony continue quietly investing in this area, proving the company remains committed to the technology over a decade after acquiring start-up Gaikai to gain a foothold.