There was a time when buying a new game felt like an event. You saved some money, carried it home and stared at the box during the journey because you know, patience was not a virtue. Now three games arrive through a subscription service, and our first thought is usually, “That looks interesting. I’ll download it and forget about it until next March.”
PlayStation has revealed its monthly games for October 2026. PlayStation Plus members will receive F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896 and Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2. All three become available on 6 October and can be added to subscribers’ libraries until 2 November. PlayStation Blog
And you know what? That is a rather decent selection. F1 25 is the official game of the 2025 Formula One season and will be available on PS5. It includes the usual career experience, along with My Team 2.0, which allows players to take control of a Formula One team.
So if you have ever watched a race and confidently explained what Ferrari should have done, now is your opportunity to make an equally questionable strategy decision from the comfort of your sofa. The game also includes online racing and a multiplayer mode where friends can compete as a squad against AI drivers. This means you can either pursue motorsport glory alone or invite other people to witness you miss the same corner several times.
Next is Hunt: Showdown 1896, also for PS5. This extraction shooter drops players into corrupted environments filled with monsters, bosses and other hunters who would quite like to take the bounty for themselves. You can enter alone or bring up to two teammates, track down your target and then attempt to leave without losing everything. Extraction shooters have a very specific talent for turning confidence into panic. One moment, your team is moving carefully and discussing a sensible plan. The next, somebody has fired at the wrong thing, another player has disappeared and you are running through a swamp with several unpleasant creatures behind you.
As part of the October lineup, subscribers can also claim a Hunt: Showdown 1896 starter pack from 6 October. That should help slightly, although no downloadable pack can guarantee that your teammates will listen.
Finally, we have Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 for PS5 and PS4. The game takes the already ridiculous idea of soldiers fighting enormous alien creatures and presents it in a colourful voxel world. Players can rescue and collect different teammates, choose four for each mission and then battle a selection of giant enemies.
It also supports four-player online co-op and two-player local split-screen. Yes, local split-screen. Remember when people played games together in the same room and one person accused the other of looking at their side of the screen? It appears the ancient tradition survives.
Individually, the three games offer a good mixture. We have realistic racing, tense monster hunting and the opportunity to fight enormous creatures on a square version of Earth. There should be something here for most players.
The question is whether anybody has time to play it all.
Subscription services have changed the way we think about games. A new addition no longer needs to convince us to spend the full purchase price. It only needs to look interesting enough for us to press “Add to Library”. And that is how the backlog grows.
It begins innocently. You add one racing game because you might play it over the weekend. Then you claim an RPG because everyone says the story becomes incredible after the first 20 hours. A co-op game joins the collection in case several friends are free at the same time, which is obviously a fantasy scenario once everyone has jobs and responsibilities. And before long, your library contains enough entertainment to survive a lengthy disappearance from society.
This does not mean PlayStation Plus offers poor value. Quite the opposite. October gives subscribers three very different games for the price of a membership they may already have. Someone who has been curious about Hunt: Showdown or unwilling to pay full price for F1 25 now has an easy opportunity to try it. But subscription value is a strange thing. We often measure it by the number of games we receive rather than the number we actually play. A library containing 300 titles sounds impressive, even if we continue opening the same familiar game every evening because learning new controls feels like administrative work.
Sony has given PlayStation Plus members another solid month. The games are varied, recognisable and large enough to occupy plenty of time.
Whether we have that time is another matter.
For now, simply add them to your library.
You can deal with the consequences next March.
