- Sony Interactive Entertainment announced the two-part Play At Home initiative on April 14th.
- The first part of the initiative is giving away free games to keep PS4 owners entertained. Those games will be Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and Journey, and they’re free through May 5th.
- The second part of the initiative is a $10 million fund to support independent game developers that are struggling as the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage the planet.
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Until we are told that it’s safe to begin the process of reopening the economy and returning to our daily lives, we’re all stuck indoors due to the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic. Thankfully, we’ve had plenty to keep us occupied while we socially distance ourselves from one another, including free sports, free shows, and free games. But we’ll take as much free content as we can get while in quarantine, and on Tuesday, Sony Interactive Entertainment threw its hat into the ring by announcing the new Play At Home initiative on the PlayStation Blog.
There are two components to the Play At Home initiative. The first, as the name suggests, is to give away free games to the PlayStation community to keep them entertained at home. Therefore, Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and Journey will be free to download on the PlayStation Store from April 15th at 8 PM PDT through May 5th, 2020 at 8 PM PDT. Once you redeem the games on your account, they’re yours to keep forever.
If you somehow missed either of these games the first time around, you owe it to yourself to snatch them as soon as they go free. Journey is one of the most beautiful, thoughtful video games of the last decade, and The Nathan Drake Collection comes with three full games, each of which is better than the last.
Unlike the free PS4 games that Sony gives away every month, you don’t need to be a PlayStation Plus subscriber to add these two games to your account. That said, if you do subscribe to PlayStation Plus, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is one of the games being given away in April, so you can play through the entire Uncharted franchise from start to finish without spending a dime. That’s certainly not a bad way to spend the next few weeks.
It is worth noting that downloads may be slower than usual due to Sony’s efforts to help service providers.
The second component of the Play At Home initiative (and the far more important one) is a $10 million fund that Sony has set up to support independent developers that might be struggling at this time. Details are scarce, but Sony says that it will provide more information about the participation criteria for the fund soon.
