One of the few bright lights during the height of the pandemic was Sony’s Play At Home program, which saw it giveaway Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and Journey during the first lockdown, and then a ton of titles earlier this year. These were free games, no strings attached, with no subscriptions or purchases required. (All you needed was a PS Store account and a PS5 or PS4 to play the games on.)
It’s something that PlayStation boss Jim Ryan is proud the company was able to offer, and he hopes that it helped in some small way get fans through the pandemic: “As everybody was struggling with the first lockdown we thought it would be a nice thing to do, and were very happy with the reaction. Then we got through Christmas and started lockdown again and it was a bit miserable so we thought it would be a nice thing to reprise. So we did it again over a period of months and over 60 million games have been downloaded as part of that.”
That’s an absolutely colossal number of downloads, and it begs the question: will Play At Home return for a third instalment next year? “We’ll see how the world evolves. If lockdown, heaven forbid, but if that should continue into 2022 and beyond, who knows, we might feel like we have to do it again for our community.”
[source youtube.com]
Comments 19
Oh yes. It got me back into Horizon even though I already owned it. A nice initiative.
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I'm not surprised a free game was downloaded a lot.
@Milt let's not spread hate. Rise above it. Extreme opinions will only bring everyone down.
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Understand the sentiment, guys, but let's focus on Play At Home, please! Thanks all!
Well this comment section took a dark turn.
Back on topic, the games they released for free were absolute bangers and I'm glad they did. The more sets of eyes you can get Ratchet and Clank in front of, the better.
Still need to try Paper Beast.
Play at home was the way I played Ratchet and Clank, Thumper, Abzu, Horizon, many games I'd never played before and I love it for that
Was happy to finally getting around to try out Subnautica because of it.
There are 100 millions PS4s. Were the games not available in some regions or did people just not claim them? There were about 10 games this year and I downloaded most of them. Number seems low per console or was it not advertised heavily on the console?
Managed to pick up a PS5 with no scalp prices.
Downloaded Horizon Zero Dawn, and instantly became a fan.
Now my switch is just sitting there while I go back and play old PS4 games I missed out on when I swithed to Nintendo.
Great job Sony. Plus these were awesome high end games and not shovelware. Giving people a chance to escape into a new world or two for some relief is commendable. Bring on round 3.
While i owned most of the games offered I was still blown away by the jester from PlayStation. Everyone should be humbled and very grateful for this act of kindness.
Maybe Sony would consider not making it pandemic lockdown dependent?
It was an awesome gesture from sony..they didnt have to do anything at all but they did and gave away great games..bravo..
@Enigk 100 million sales is not 100 million live systems. I bought 3 PS4's just for myself. Day1 PS4 (died) a replacement PS4 and a PS4 Pro. In general after 7 years it may be only 50% are live and active
@TooBarFoo That is still say only 1 download per "live" console. I assume a lot of people downloaded most of them like me. Unless most people already had the games so couldn't claim them again leading to lower numbers. I wasn't expecting every console to download every game as that would be over a billion. Number just seems a bit low for something that was free. Normally people would run someone over just to get free stuff is all.
@Enigk Sadly the Play at Home initiative is not advertised hard enough, and like you said alot of gamers have already bought these games or claimed them in the past thru PS+.
Not to mention not everyone knows how to claim these free games...even though it's as easy as Add to Library.
(You don't even need to own a console, just create a free account and claim them on your PC or mobile etc)
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