PlayStation Plus Adds Avatar and Rise of the Ronin on July 21

Starting July 21, Sony Interactive Entertainment is bolstering the PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium catalog with two significant additions: Avatar Frontiers of Pandora and Rise of the Ronin. Two open worlds released in late 2023 and early 2024 respectively, joining the subscription less than two years after their commercial launch.

Two open worlds, two bets Sony is collecting

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft, attempted to make Pandora a credible FPS playground. The result was solid, technically polished, but struggled to convince against a saturated open-world market. Rise of the Ronin, meanwhile, is a PlayStation 5 exclusive from Team Ninja—the studio behind Nioh and Wo Long—set in Japan during the late Edo period. More ambitious in narrative and combat systems, it nonetheless divided critics on the quality of its graphical execution.

Seeing them arrive together in the catalog is no editorial accident. Sony is building a coherent catch-up offer around the open-world genre, which remains one of the most consumed formats on console.

The signal that subscription services are absorbing titles faster

Rise of the Ronin launched in March 2024. Its integration into PlayStation Plus Extra comes roughly 28 months after its commercial release. That's on the lower end of the timeline observed for Sony exclusives in recent years—windows are steadily tightening. Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, published by Ubisoft in December 2023, follows a similar trajectory: Ubisoft has gotten into the habit of feeding subscription services by accelerating rotation cycles to maintain visibility for its titles when retail sales lose momentum.

For the subscriber, it's an excellent deal. For the publisher, it's a compromise: direct sales revenue is behind them, and the subscription takes over as the storefront. This model, which Microsoft normalized with Game Pass as early as 2017 with titles like Halo 5 Guardians and Forza Horizon 3, is now fully integrated into Sony's strategy.

Playing Avatar Frontiers of Pandora in 2026 means finding a visually impressive title—Massive Entertainment pushed the Snowdrop engine to its limits—but narratively lazy. The gameplay loop holds up if you accept its limitations. Rise of the Ronin, on the other hand, gains from being (re)discovered with perspective: its stance-based combat system is one of the most refined Team Ninja has delivered, and its semi-open mission structure wears better than a conventional open world.

Neither redefines its genre. But in a subscription catalog, the question isn't "is this a masterpiece?"—it's "is it worth my time without dropping 70 bucks?" On that front, both titles answer yes without hesitation.

PlayStation Plus holds its ground against Game Pass, but on execution

Sony was long criticized for slow additions to Extra compared to Microsoft's day-one policy. The service has grown more consistent since 2023, and additions like this one—two 20- to 30-hour titles, no filler—show that the curation strategy is working. It's not groundbreaking, but it's solid execution. Subscribers who shelved these two games have no excuse left to skip them now.