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No thanks, I'm on a diet.
I can no longer indulge in the luxury that is PlayStation Plus. I'm canceling.
It's a decision I made that was reaffirmed after reading an email from Sony last week that enthusiastically reminded me of what the service has offered me over last year: a bunch of (usually) dated content that I don't need and couldn't possibly find the time to play.
Ironically enough, that was one of the reasons I championed the service in the first place. When I initially signed up, Sony gifted me LittleBigPlanet and six other games…that I had previously purchased. I had better luck with my second month because I didn't own most of the new content, but it turns out there was a reason for that: It was all complete shit.
The subsequent monthly offerings rarely impressed. I was caught off guard only once when Stacking was made available to subscribers at no cost. Red Faction: Battlegrounds was another complimentary title, but let's face it: It's one of the worst games that's come out this year.
My Plus subscription also afforded me access to several "exclusive" betas, but few were actually worth my time. I was never able to find a match during the SOCOM 4 beta, and the Infamous 2 user-generated-content preview was an abject failure. The Uncharted 3 beta went public before I even got the chance to play it, so I wouldn't really call that exclusive.
More than anything else, though, the Killzone 3 beta was the thing that sealed the fate of my Plus account. Believe it or not, it wasn't the whole hacking debacle. Having my personal personal information compromised certainly concerned me, but by that point, I had already made my decision.
Nope, it's the Killzone 3 closed beta. For those of you who don't know — or have understandably forgotten — Sony gave access to the closed beta to the first 10,000 Plus subscribers who downloaded a Killzone 3 Xross Media Bar theme. Paying just under $70 a year wasn't enough to gain access to a multiplayer demo; you had to jump through another little (time-sensitive) hoop to have the honor of helping in-house developer Guerrilla Games fine-tune its multiplayer.
That just about did it for me. The much-publicized PlayStation Network outage certainly didn't help matters, but I didn't appreciate the audacity of Sony asking me to perform menial tasks in order to access what I had already paid for.
Funnily enough, I recently extended my Xbox Live subscription, even though I rarely play multiplayer games on my 360. Maybe it has something to do with that service being a necessity while PlayStation Plus is a luxury: a luxury in which I no longer wish to indulge.