Disgusting.

Hope it backfires hard.

I just upgraded my 12-month essential to premium.

The problem will come later if you want to reduce it down to say + Extra.  You can change the plan down at any time, but it doesn't actually change until your expiration so you can't take advantage of future discounts like the Black Friday 25% off deal until your subscription expired and renewed itself at full price at the new tier.  If you plan on keeping premium long term, you can take advantage of the Black Friday deals and extend it further at a discount.

I think the Extra and Premium tiers are awesome, but I personally don't use them, so I just go for the Essential. And while I love Playstation (been buying their consoles since I first got PS1 all the way back in 1995), this might be my last time I pony up for their online service--which makes my recent PS5 acquisition a little worrisome. Eighty dollars for the right to play online games, which is something I don't do often, is a little too steep for me to justify. And man... I really don't want to lose cloud saves lol. 

I did the calculations and I have planned it out. Over the course of the year of the sub I will save my money back and more. Sea of Stars has already saved me 20% the cost.

Sounds lame.
I'm glad I don't need to continue paying a subscription to keep a bunch of my games.

I'm still mad af its common practice now to lock online play behind a paywall for consoles.

That part I kind of agree on. Like I can sort of get trying to recoup costs for running PSN, but it should not be that high for essential. Or at least they should have like a 4.99 price point for Plus Base (no Monthly games, Exclusive discounts, or whatever) that covers purely the cost of running PSN for 1 person. 

You would need to build that library.
But if you look here, you will see a few thousand free titles with titles like DOTA, Counter Strike, Team Fortress etc'.
https://store.steampowered.com/genre/Free%20to%20Play/

GOG has a list of free games that can be accessed here, some of which I enjoyed back in the day like Dink Smallwood and Postal:
https://www.gog.com/en/partner/free_games

uPlay has it's free games here:
https://store.ubisoft.com/us/free-pc-games?lang=en_US

And Epic Store has it's free games here, which includes new free games every week plus a chunk of FTP titles:
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/free-games

Microsoft has it's free titles here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/top-free/games/pc

I would suggest you pay attention to the PC main thread for the latest and greatest free game giver-aways as the PC market is a big place.
Or keep an eye on: https://gg.deals
Which will let you know of what is being discounted, what is free and more.

And obviously we can't forget:
Humble Bundle:
https://www.humblebundle.com

Fanatical Bundle:
https://www.fanatical.com/en/

Never asserted anything to the contrary. - It was a counter argument that the "PC Gets no good games only consoles do" when it literally gets all the Playstation/Xbox console games.

Are you new at this?

So... Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is shit to you which was last weeks give-away?

Bundles are actually cheap, you also give back to charity.

I am in Australia, so my pricing isn't going to be representative of your pricing, thus it's pointless for me to go down that path.

But you do not need the latest PC to play the latest games, one of my PC's from 12 years ago can still play the latest titles like Hogwarts or Starfield just fine, better than a Series S.

However I am not starting from scratch, so my game library comes with me through the generations without issue and everytime I bring my games forwards to a new PC, the games look and run better.

They are probably doing this expecting to lose fewer than 20% of their subscribers, as that's around the figure that would still make them more money than if they kept the current pricings.

In other words, if more than 20% unsubscribe or don't renew as a result of this, that may cause them to reverse course.

If you are on a subscription that's about to expire, it could be a good idea to not renew at least for a while and see how they react.
I'm unfortunately on a year long sub that won't expire any time soon, so I can't really join in on the 'protest'.

And yeah, if this sticks, Nintendo and Microsoft will likely be considering something like this as well.