Sony has announced three free games for PlayStation Plus subscribers in July to celebrate the service's tenth anniversary. PS Plus usually offers only two free titles per month; Star Wars Battlefront 2 and Call of Duty: WWII have been free throughout this June.

Sony was one of the first to offer free games on a regular basis as part of its consoles' online subscription service. PlayStation Plus introduced monthly free games for its subscribers back in June of 2012, and it quickly proved to be a popular business strategy. A year later, Microsoft began adding free games to Xbox Live Gold every month as well. More and more companies adopted the practice over time; Humble Bundle now offers a trove of free games each month, Nintendo includes NES and SNES classics with its online subscription, and the Epic Games Store gives users free games just for having an account. PlayStation Plus has given out over 1000 different games since 2012, and there will be three more of them soon.

Related: Sony Should Make PlayStation Plus Free For All

The official PlayStation Blog has revealed the upcoming lineup of free games for PlayStation Plus in July. In celebration of PS Plus' tenth anniversary, there will be three freebies available from July 7 through August 3: Rise of the Tomb Raider, NBA 2K20, and the unique narrative hybrid game Erica. Sony thanked its subscribers for supporting PS Plus for the past decade, and added that a special commemorative theme will soon be on PlayStation Store for a limited time.

 

PS Plus Free Games NBA 2K20 Rise of the Tomb Raider Erica

Sony also provided a brief timeline of facts about the service now that it has turned ten years old. Wipeout HD was the first game given to PS Plus members for free, and there were 64 free games in total within that first year. Since then, PS Plus has accumulated over 41.5 million users. Sony had been offering free monthly games for PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation Vita for a long time, but it ended that support for those three systems earlier last year.

It's hard to believe that PlayStation Plus has been around for a decade now. Microsoft's Xbox Live had the upper hand in the market for quite a while before Sony improved its online infrastructure (and started charging for service as a result). As far as the free games go, the overall value has been undeniable - even when the quality of many of those games has been in debate. As the industry approaches the next console generation, it'll be interesting to see how Sony will improve PS Plus on PS5.

Next: Which PlayStation Icon Are You Based On Your Zodiac?

Source: PlayStation