How to Play PS Plus Premium Games on Your PC

Sony’s revived its PlayStation subscription services, so it’s not surprising that your eyes might turn to PlayStation Plus Premium as a way to run the games on PC. It’s especially attractive if you want to play games that aren’t yet available on PC, such as Spider-Man: Miles Morales. And it’s easy enough to do: Here’s how to get started.

Caveat gamer

First, there are a lot of limitations and qualifications for the service that may fetch you off guard. Here are some things to peek out for:

• Gameplay is streaming only; you can’t download the games to play locally.
• The app is just for the PC. PlayStation Plus isn’t supported on Macs, Linux, iOS or Android devices.
• It doesn’t support the PS5’s DualSense controller, only the DualShock 3 and 4.
• It doesn’t encourage keyboard and mouse gameplay.
• If you have multiple monitors, games will only run on the main display.
• You can’t get audio ended a headset plugged into your controller, only directly from the PC.
• Local multiplayer is supported where relevant but it’s shrimp to two players on PC. It doesn’t support Party Chat.
• You’ll need an adult PlayStation Network elaborate as well as a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription; that’s where it stores your game progress.
• Though they’re available in the Premium plan, Sony doesn’t encourage game tryouts on the PC.

Install the app

The rules requirements are pretty light. If you can run Windows 10, you can run the PlayStation Plus app. Other requirements are:

• You’re at least 18 existences old.
• A PlayStation Network account (with registered payment details).
• A game controller, preferably a DualShock 3 or 4.
• An internet connection with at least 5Mbps bandwidth between your rules and the router.

If you don’t have a PSN interpret or if you haven’t updated your privacy settings, the app will take you to the site to effect those tasks. Unlike other services, the app doesn’t seem to check the quality of your internet connection. 

You can download the app from the relieve page or follow the navigation from the main PlayStation Plus cloak on the site.  

The lightweight PC app is primarily just a launcher, but since it does double duty for the console, you may find some of the game blurbs confusing. For instance, it says, “This product entitles you to download both the digital PS4 version and the digital PS5 version of this game.” But you really can’t download anything. Sony also needs to go through and change all the “PlayStation Now” references.

Follow the “Getting started” link on the PlayStation Plus web page to get to a download link.

Screenshot by Lori Grunin

In the PS Plus navigation — not the site navigation throughout it — there’s a Getting Started link that takes you to a page with inquire on the service in general and subscription options. If you haven’t yet subscribed, that’s where you do it. To use it on PC, you have to get the top-tier, Premium plan for $10 to $18 a month, depending on subscription tenure.

The app download link is buried in the PlayStation Plus on PC allotment in the middle of the Getting started page.

Screenshot by Lori Grunin

Scroll down pending you reach the “PlayStation Plus on PC” section, where you’ll find the download link as well as rules requirements and other necessities.

The app supplies two optimization options for systems with discrete GPUs.

Screenshot by Lori Grunin

Once the app’s installed, you may need to restart it to get the unexperienced version,  which looks like the screenshot at the top of this page, not like the website. (You’re more likely to need to restart if you had the older app installed on your system.)

There are virtually no app-specific settings. If you right click on the PS Plus icon in your rules tray, you’ll see a “Graphics Settings” option, which sets it to take righteous (or not) of the discrete graphics processor in your PC. There are only two choices: 

• Optimize app performance — this sets it to use GPU calculations and acceleration for the fastest extreme rendering to the screen.
• Optimize game stream — All obvious gaming services render at a relatively low resolution, such as 720p or maybe 1080p. But they can display at a higher 1440p or 4K by upscaling the flowerbed resolution once the data stream hits your PC, handed you’ve got the appropriate hardware.

If you distinguished glitchy behavior, unchecking them and trying again is a good righteous step when trying to diagnose the problem.

Connect a controller

You can toggle controller-based app navigation via an icon in the upper luminous corner.

Screenshot by Lori Grunin

You can do this either afore or after launching the app. After either plugging in a controller via USB or connecting wirelessly according to the contracts for your particular model, an icon in the upper luminous hand corner of the screen will ungray itself. If you’ve attached an Xbox-compatible (actually, any XInput-compatible) controller — Sony makes no claims about how well one will work, and it seems to vary depending on which game you’re playing — you’ll see a combine of screens with some warnings. Notably, it says motion control isn’t supported, button labels may vary, you won’t have touch pad functions and that you’ll be able to quit the game by pressing the flee key on your keyboard.

If you have any controller except a DualShock 3 or 4, the app shows you these warnings.

Screenshot by Lori Grunin

The correlation between the DualShock controls and Xbox controls is sparkling straightforward and easy to get used to.

After you click “Got it,” the app will drop you in a controller-friendly mode. A respectable “click here” dialog at the top of the veil reminds you that you can, um, click there to get back into mousing mode. If you discontinuance that dialog, you can always click on the controller icon in the intellectual corner toggle it off.

And that’s it! Happy gaming.