Sony launches PlayStation Spartacus service for as much as $18 per month

Sony has finally revealed its much-talked-about Spartacus update for PlayStation Plus. This is the effort to combine the various offerings of Plus and PS Now under one program. As I reported earlier this year, the service come in three tiers called PlayStation Plus Essential, Extra, and Premium. That starts at $10 per month ($25 for 3 months/$60 annually) for Essential, which is identical to the current PS Plus option. But that price quickly jumps to $18 per month for Premium or $120 per year. All of these changes will click over in June, according to a PlayStation blog post.

The key details about each tier are the same as what I reported on previously. While Essential is just the current PS Plus, Extra gets you access to a library of over 400 PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 games in an ever-growing catalogue. Those games include both older first- and third-party releases. Premium then adds the option to stream games from the cloud as well as time-limited game trials. But it also adds retro games from the PlayStation 1, 2, PSP, and 3 — although, that last platform only works through the cloud.