Sony is bringing back its Play At Home program, which gifted popular games to PlayStation users for free during the pandemic. This time around, though, it’s also offering up some streaming perks as well. Starting on March 25th, anime streaming service Funimation will offer extended access for new subscribers. In all, those who take advantage will get the standard 14-day trial, plus another 90 days on top of that.
Jim Ryan, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s president and CEO, laid out the details in a blog post today, where he described the program as a way to say thanks during difficult times.
“The past 12 months haven’t been easy. And I think we’re all hopeful that we may be starting to see some flickers of light at the end of this long COVID-19 tunnel thanks to the tireless work of the medical community and people around the world,” Ryan said. “In these historic times, the team at PlayStation wanted to thank the community by giving something back. These days, we could all use something to look forward to and another reason to stay safely socially distanced, so we are happy to be able to offer a free selection of great games and some entertainment offers.”
Back in April of 2020, the company started offering free titles as part of the Play At Home program, including games like Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and Journey. In his blog post, Ryan said the company wanted to go further this time around, hence the addition of streaming offers as well as more free games like the PlayStation 4 hit Ratchet and Clank.
This year’s program is expected to kick off in March and continue through June, with Ryan mentioning more entertainment offers to come as the initiative continues.
The extended offer for Funimation will be available to new users in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Meanwhile many in Western and Northern Europe will see offers for the service’s European division Wakanim. Late last year, we reported on AT&T selling its own anime service, Crunchyroll, to Sony’s Funimation.
We’ll keep an eye out for more streaming offers as the Play At Home program progresses over the next few months.