Between price hikes and holiday spending, now more than ever you might be wondering which of your active subscriptions are worth taking with you to 2026. If PS Plus Essential is one of them, you might want to keep it, because even though it's only $80 a year, subscribers were entitled to $1,500 worth of free games throughout 2025.
Thanks to Push Square crunching the numbers, we now know that if you got all 39 games to own through Essential this year, you'd a library that contains $1,500 worth of games you didn't have to pay. Well, they didn't have to pay out of pocket for the subscription which, since Essential is the cheapest level of PS Plus, costs $80 a year, so a fraction of the price of the games being given away.
$1500 base games in 12 months
Among these 39 core gifts were also some very large titles. Like it or not, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, a base game just a year after its release, was a big deal, contributing $70 to the $1,500 total. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was Essential's big game in March, just five months after its release. Other heavy hitters handed out for the rest of 2025 included Psychonuts 2, Alan Wake 2 and Lies of P.
There are a few caveats. For starters, quite a few of these games have been included in various PlayStation Store sales. For example, Kill The Justice League was occasionally available for less than $10. To keep things simple, the Essential total uses the MSRP of all the games that were given away.
Each game is coming to PS Plus Essential, Extra and Premium in December 2025
Every game added to Essential, Extra and Premium and the dates you'll be able to play them for free.
The games are in your library, but you don't technically own them
There is also an asterisk next to your ownership of the listed games, or more specifically, that you don't have one. Unlike other game gifts like the one currently running through the Epic Games Store, you can't keep Essential games. If your subscription expires, your access to these games will be revoked unless you purchase them. They will still be there waiting for you if and when you renew your subscription.
PlayStation has been giving away games via Plus for years and shows no signs of ending that tradition in 2026. That is, unless you're still playing most of your PlayStation games on PS4. PlayStation has confirmed that starting with January's Essential gifts, PS4 games will no longer be included by default each month. Until now, every monthly haul included at least one PS4 game.
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