Eight Yakuza games to be added to PlayStation Plus this year

Sony has announced that it will be bringing eight games from the (mostly) beloved Jacobs series to PlayStation Plus for the rest of the year, with the service first hitting it off in August. Be careful, though - if you've subscribed to the base PlayStation Plus Essential tier, you'll only get one game.

The whole thing is starting with Jacobs: Like a Dragon (a great place to start for newcomers to the series), which will be one of the PlayStation Plus monthly games for August. That means you'll be able to claim it with any PS Plus subscription - no matter what tier you pay for. Other monthly games are also some heavy hitters. There's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 & 2, which my colleague Andrew Webster called "this just might be the perfect video game remaster" and Little Nightmare, a horror game in the vein of limbo. Sony is offering PlayStation Plus discounts on Rollerdrome, which releases on August 16, described as "an intense shooter-skater hybrid set in an evocative retrofuture."

Additional and premium customers will have access to Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, and Yakuza Kiwami 2 in August, as the games are coming to the game catalog. Sony says the remasters of Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 with Yakuza 6: The Song of Life will be available "later this year" for additional and premium customers.

In some ways, the move was almost necessary for Sony—the Yakuza series debuted on the PlayStation console, but for the past few years, arguably the best way to play it has been on Xbox Game Pass or the excellent PC port. Now that Sony has reconfigured PlayStation Plus to be more competitive with Microsoft's service, those with PS4s and PS5s (and an additional or premium subscription) will also be able to just sit back and take in the series.