Right, what’s going on here then? We have a new subscription service, there are three tiers, and on paper they make pretty good sense. Here’s a quick-ish summary.
PS Plus Essential is basically the Old PS Plus: it costs £49.99 per year and you get the usual monthly games, the online multiplayer access, the extra discounts in the digital store, and all the other old bits and bobs like cloud storage for your saves and the pretty nice assortment of PS Plus Essential games that arrived with the PS5.
The other two tiers are the new things. The next one up is PS Plus Extra, which costs £83.99 per year and gets you all of the above, plus a “Game Catalogue”. The top tier meanwhile, PS Plus Premium, costs £99.99 per year and gets you all that plus the ability to cloud stream some games, play some demos, and get access to another collection of games, this one called the “Classics Catalogue”.
It is probably fair to say that the two catalogues are what will matter most to most people, and it’s also probably fair to say these two catalogues are where things stop making quite as much sense. You take a look at the very long, very weird list of games you can get with Extra or Premium, and try to pin that lot down.