PS5, PS4 players are using a clever trick to claim three months’ worth of PS Plus Essential free games with a one-month subscription. While the games do require an active membership to play, we see why some folks are resorting to using this trick, and we are quite impressed with it.
How PS Plus users are claiming 3 months of free games with a 1-month subscription
It’s all about timing. There are several occasions during the year when the first Tuesday of the month (when Essential games go live) falls on a day that allows users to claim monthly lineups for the previous month, current month, and following month with a one-month subscription.
January 2026 was one such occasion, as highlighted by Reddit user maxsteel126. If you purchased a month-long PS Plus Essential membership on January 5, you would have been able to claim December 2025’s free games. Today, January’s lineup went live, so you can claim those freebies too.
February’s lineup will go live on Tuesday, February 3, two days before your sub in this specific example will expire. So you’ll also be able to claim February’s free games, too. That makes three months and an average of nine games.
As for why players are doing this, considering the games can’t be accessed without a subscription and one month wouldn’t be enough to play most of the games, the comments in this thread do a good job of explaining the rationale.
“I’ve been doing similar stuff the past year while tackling my endless backlog. I’ll pause the backlog every other month and play a PS Plus title or two, then right back to the backlog,” wrote one player, explaining that it’s cheaper than buying a 12-month subscription.
“They [the games] are locked to your account for a time when maybe you want to play them,” another explained.
Since Essential games remain in players’ libraries, this makes sense.
Have our readers used this trick?
