Quitting PS Plus after 10 years has me missing one PS5 feature

After quitting PS Plus in June 2024, I’ve found that I don’t miss much about the subscription scheme. Sure, I can no longer play some of the best PS Plus games in my library, but I’d stopped playing monthly games ages ago. In fact, after being a subscriber for over ten years, there’s really only one feature I actually miss and that’s the PS Plus Essential cloud save feature.

Back in June 2013, I started what would ultimately be an eleven-year-long subscription to PlayStation Plus after having dipped my toe in a few months at a time for a few years. Now, as of July 2024, I’ve gone my first month without a PS Plus subscription in a decade. It’s literally the end of an era.

It certainly helped that the latest batch of PlayStation Plus July 2024 monthly games were pretty rubbish. Although, to be fair, it’s been years since I really cared about a monthly game. I’ve mostly been using PS Plus Premium to nosy at PS1 games and not much else.

Still, I’ll admit — I was worried that I would miss out on something if I ended my subscription. In case you aren’t aware, here are the main features a PS Plus subscription offers PS5 and PS4 players:

When written out that way, it seems almost like you’re getting a lot of useful features with your subscription. Of course, online multiplayer is the big one — it forced my hand to subscribe in the first place and it’s likely what forced your hand.

However, now that most of the best online games are free PS5 games that don’t require PS Plus to enjoy, there’s less incentive than ever to sign up for that subscription. I don’t think I’ve ever used Share Play, and the volatility of PS Plus Extra and Premium’s catalogs have forced me to buy the games I want anyway.

So, all-in-all, dropping PS Plus has proven to be a pretty smooth move. However, I’ll admit there was one PS Plus feature that I completely overlooked: PS5 and PS4 Cloud Storage. Perhaps the least sexy PS Plus selling point of all.

I’ll admit that these cloud saves are a pretty fancy feature that isn’t likely to make much different to most subscribers. In fact, I can only think of one type of person who will really miss this PS Plus feature, and that’s PlayStation fans with too many consoles. Unfortunately, I fall into that description.

The first time I noticed that I was missing a PS Plus feature was when I decided I’d move my LA Noire PS4 session from the living room PS5 to my old PS4 upstairs. I fired up the PS4, moved to download my save file from the cloud, and realized how much of a fool I was.

I’ll be honest — I’ve been doing this little cloud saving trick pretty regularly. With my PS5, I’ll play the PS4 version of a game like Balatro so that whenever I want to free up the TV or let my partner play something else, I can just jump onto the other console and continue from my most recent save file. It’s an absurdly handy feature, if remarkably niche.

It’s around here where I would usually plead my case to Sony and say something like “hey, make Cloud Storage free like it is on Steam,” or something to that effect. However, in all this I want to remind you, the reader, that you probably don’t actually use PS Plus as much as you think you do. In which case, don’t be afraid to consider cutting the cord.

I think after the PS Plus annual subscription price hike for 2023, I started to feel caught up in an increasingly unhealthy relationship with Sony. I’m sure many subscribers out there feel this way too, and my advice to you is to simply let your PS Plus subscription expire and see for yourself whether you really need it.

Sure, I’m hurting in the most banal way possible from this loss of cloud saves, but I can obviously live without it. It’s certainly not worth paying $79.99 a year for the privlege of moving my files around easily. Heck, I’m not even thrilled about paying Apple $2.99 a month to keep my files on their Cloud Storage platform, and I actually use that one everyday!

Frankly, the idea we’re getting charged to play some of the best PS5 multiplayer games around when we can avoid all that on PC has always been ridiculous. That said, do you still get value out of the monthly PS Plus games? If so, let us know in the comments to help even this out, because I’m not trying to say PS Plus is entirely worthless.