Play At Home Initiative Returns With PlayStation Profits In Mind

SIE President and CEO Jim Ryan is back with another PlayStation Blog post and he has confirmed that the Play At Home Initiative is returning in 2021.

Starting in March, PlayStation are offering up a “series of free games and entertainment offers” for the PlayStation community to help make the remaining months of Social Distancing a little less horrible.

Although we only know what’s coming in March 2021, it’s an interesting step in an interesting direction for PlayStation users which could lead to higher expectations from Sony.

Play At Home’s First Free Game

2016’s Ratchet & Clank title will be the first free game available as a part of the Play At Home initiative from PlayStation.

You’ll need to claim it from the PlayStation Store between March 1st 20:00 PT / March 2nd 04:00 GMT and March 31st 20:00 PT / April 1st 04:00 GMT.

” Once you redeem the game, it will be yours to keep. This 2016 PS4 action-adventure hit from Insomniac Games revisits the origin stories of these beloved PlayStation heroes and features a great mix of outrageous combat and comedy.”

Although Ratchet & Clank was a PS Plus title in the past and is currently a free title in the PS Plus Collection for PS5 players with an active PS Plus subscription… It’s a start, right?

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Well, yes and no. It is a fantastic gesture from PlayStation to help encourage their players to follow the widely-accepted Social Distancing rules to curb the spread of COVID-19.

However, it is also largely an empty one. The game was previously made available for free and it is currently free for a large percentage of it’s player base. It’s hard to imagine PlayStation is going to lose anything by offering Ratchet & Clank up for free for a month on top of it’s PS Plus titles and at that point the message of staying at home would do a similar job.

Funimation Is Free Too?

In addition to Ratchet & Clank, PlayStation are offering new Funimation subscribers an additional 90 days of free access to the streaming service.

In Jim Ryan’s blog post, he is clear that Funimation is a “joint venture of Sony Pictures Entertainment and Aniplex of Japan” and there are disclaimers regarding the availability of the service.

This extended access for new subscribers will begin on March 25th and there is no word on whether it is over.

READ MORE: PS Plus – March 2021 Predictions

Although this is all well and good, everyone knows how easy it is to sign up for something like Funimation and then forget to cancel your subscription.

In a similar fashion to how Disney+ offered a 14-day free Trial that would roll on to a monthly subscription service, this almost seems like a ploy to get more Funimation subscribers going forward.

The small print confirms everyone’s suspicions as you can see below…

” Unless you cancel your subscription before the end of the period, your subscription will automatically roll into a paid-for, ongoing subscription with a recurring monthly fee.”

Of course, it is a fantastic gesture but when you view it alongside the reveal that Ratchet & Clank will be free again… It almost doesn’t seem worthwhile.

PlayStation could do so much more for Pandemic Relief efforts and, when you look at what they did for the Black Lives Matter movement, it seems like they should.

In the summer, Jim Ryan spoke to CNET about a series of donations PlayStation were pledging to Black Lives Matter organisations in the wake of the George Floyd protests that swept both the United States and the world.

These issues led to delays across the industry, out of respect over difficulties meeting deadlines, and PlayStation ended up pledging $1,000,000 to various causes.

” There are moments in life when something happens around you and you realize that what you’ve been doing is either not big enough, not good enough, or just wrong. This is such a moment. We are going to take a good hard look at how we behave as a company, and how we behave towards our community.”

Jim Ryan, on the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.

It isn’t a direct comparison, of course, but you have to see that the difference in response is almost too obvious. especially when you consider that the COVID-19 pandemic is adversely affecting ethnic minorities across the world.

It isn’t PlayStation’s responsibility to provide aids to these causes, but if Jim Ryan is making it perfectly clear that the SIE group has the means to actually make an impactful donation to these causes…

Should they make more of an effort supporting Pandemic Relief organisations?

To read more about PlayStation’s Play At Home Initiative, check out Jim Ryan’s PlayStation Blog post here.