PS Plus vs. Xbox Games with Gold: Which Free Games Were Better In 2018?
Who Wins?
I said earlier that players could have been content playing only Sony’s PS Plus lineup of “free” games in 2018 and I meant it. As good as it has been this year also, the same can’t quite be said of Xbox Games with Gold. Just glancing down the list of games comparing the headline offerings, there’s just no comparison overall.
Sony managed to find a way to include games of all different genres and pepper them in at appropriate moments throughout the year: story-driven RPGs like Deus Ex, critically acclaimed exclusives such as Bloodborne, and even a contemporary smash hit in Destiny 2 right before its best-received DLC (Forsaken) launched.
There’s just such a pleasing spread of different games being offered, and it felt as though Sony’s PS Plus was the trendsetter in stepping up the quality of games included in its online service this year. Microsoft started slowly by comparison, and even when they did finally get going with titles such as Metal Gear Solid V, there were too many mediocre months in which the momentum was then lost.
One can’t ignore mention the sheer quality of games offered by Sony, too. It’s something that we won’t see next year as PS3 and Vita support ends but it’s incredible to think that the entire Sony console ecosystem has been kept afloat by the service in 2018.
Sure, they weren’t often particularly interesting games, but owners of PS4, PS3, PS Vita, and sometimes even PSVR had months in which their subscription was feeding them free games across all platforms. You can’t knock that value.
Yet in gushing about Sony’s service, it isn’t to say Xbox Games with Gold was a bad deal. On the contrary, it raised the bar similarly and 2018 will go down as the best in its history. It just didn’t quite have the wow factor to topple Sony’s PS Plus, which surprised us that little bit more often.
