14 DAY TRIAL // The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are now available for purchase in quite a few countries worldwide.
While the two consoles have different approaches in terms of gaming, entertainment, and other services, as you could tell from our own reviews, each use a premium service to offer owners more features and advantages.
On the PlayStation 4, there's PlayStation Plus, and on the Xbox One there's Xbox Live Gold.
While none of these features is mandatory, one console of the two aforementioned ones is extremely crippled if you don't have it.
Both services regulate access to online multiplayer in terms of games, which even though makes very little sense, as they're robbing players of features for a game they paid for, should, in theory, make that experience more enjoyable.
After this point, however, the two consoles use their services in different ways.
The PS4 allows Plus users access to free games via the Instant Collection which, while not that big for now (only Resogun and Contrast at launch) promises to grow with new titles like Don't Starve or Drive Club.
On the Xbox One, Microsoft has promised that Games with Gold will appear on the new console but, as of yet, no actual launch date was promised.
Sticking with Microsoft's console, here Gold is mandatory if you want to access many core features of the next-gen console, from its TV functionality, to entertainment apps that already require separate subscriptions (Netflix) to even mechanics like the Internet Explorer web browser, not to mention free-to-play games.
On the PS4, Sony doesn't require a Plus subscription for access to entertainment applications or free-to-play experiences.
Both services have advantages and disadvantages but, in the end, Sony's PlayStation Plus, at least for me, makes more sense than Xbox Live Gold. What's more, the PS4, even without a Plus subscription still retains a lot of its capabilities, unlike the Xbox One, which becomes just a single-player offline experience.