Lee —
PS Stars successfully brings new players to games like Monkey Island and Killer Frequency
Using a gameplay data sample from over 3.4 million active PSN accounts (courtesy of our partnership with Game Trends), I’ve been keeping an eye on the five games featured in the March 2025 edition of the “PlayStation Plus Game Catalog” campaign: Killer Frequency, Return to Monkey Island, Embr, Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed, and Nour: Play With Your Food.
PS Plus subscribers can find this campaign in the PS App.Available exclusively to users with PS Plus Extra and Premium subscriptions, the campaign gives out an easy 50 points for booting up any of the listed games, all of which are featured in the PS Plus Game Catalog. Now, two weeks after the campaign hit the PS App, we can verify that people actually do check these out, because across those five games we saw an average uptick of 80.4% with PS Plus Extra players!
Some games pulled in a lot more interested subscribers than others, as you might expect. Team17’s Killer Frequency saw the biggest boost with at least 157.5% more players checking it out. Similarly, Return to Monkey Island saw a 91.7% player count boost and was the most popular game of the lot (it just happened to already have more active players than the rest).
Other games didn’t pull in quite so many new players — like Embr (20.9% boost) and the admittedly annoying Nour (48% boost) — but it seems regardless of their stature they all gained some fresh attention! Even Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed saw a 84.1% player count boost, and seemingly nobody likes that game.
Of course, just because players are booting up these games, that doesn’t mean they’re sticking around and actually playing them. It only takes a few seconds to start a game, claim your PS Stars reward, and then shut it down before going back to Fortnite or whatever your ideal flavor of brain rot looks like.
Still, it’s heartening to see PlayStation Stars have the potential to expand the tastes of PS5 and PS4 players! I certainly gave Killer Frequency a try as a result of the campaign, and while I decided it wasn’t really my thing (the writing felt very obnoxious, I’m sorry!), at least I was playing something I otherwise might have missed.
PS Stars might still be trailing itself along in March 2025, but I’m happy to see that some players out there are making the most of it and completing campaigns. Now, if Sony could just get that PS5 integration figured out, who knows how many players we’d see checking out underloved PS Plus games? Let us know whether you booted up any of these games down in the comments below.
- When an account opens a game, this is registered as a game being played. Accounts can only register a game once per week.
- Our data is good for suggesting general trends — we represent this using percentages, not numbers.
