Free PlayStation Plus slammed as 'blessing and curse at the same time'

Sony has just started crediting PlayStation users with five free days of PlayStation Plus, but said form of compensation may end up costing thousands of users a lot more money in the long run.

On February 7 last month, the PlayStation Network went down for roughly two days.

Naturally, this impacted a lot of users' weekend plans and stopped them from using a service they pay for, so Sony has begun automatically crediting PlayStation Plus subscribers with five free extra days as a way of apology.

But there is a pretty huge downside to all this.

Whenever Sony offers discounts on PlayStation Plus subscriptions during certain sale periods on the PlayStation Store, these offers only actually work if you don’t already have an active PlayStation Plus subscription.

To counter this, a lot of people time it so that their subscription expires during these sale periods… which means that if you now suddenly have an extra five days automatically tacked onto your account, you could miss this window of eligibility.

The PlayStation community isn’t best pleased with Sony due to this, at least based on the comments in a thread over on the r/PlayStationPlus subreddit.

“I just hope the new Days of play sale in June does not kick me out of the discount period,” commented user DarkRaider78.

“The sale usually ends on 12th june, My sub used to end on 6th june but now it stands at 11th - Fingers Crossed that the sale does not end before that.”

“Just as a heads up, I waited the long wait for Sony customer service chat just to be told they're unable to remove the five days added due to the outage,” replied user CleR6.

“So if you're hoping they'll just revert it for you, then you'll be disappointed.”

It’s impossible to say whether or not Sony intentionally planned this, but it’s more than likely that they’ll profit from it regardless.

Either way, you may want to keep an eye on when your PlayStation Plus subscription will now end if you are planning to take advantage of any upcoming sales.