PlayStation 4 Buyers Will Get Gift Cards and Free Subscriptions

Users picking up their PlayStation 4 pre-orders next week won’t get just the console, its controller and all the necessary cables. Sony’s also throwing in gift cards for three of its online services absolutely free of charge.

According to a blog post today by Sony, users buying the PlayStation 4 this holiday season will receive a free month of the service’s PlayStation Plus online service, a free month of Sony Music Unlimited and $10 worth of credit to purchase whatever content they want from Sony’s PlayStation Store. While each of these gifts might seem small, each are also very important in their own way.

For example, the PlayStation 4 now requires that users have a PlayStation Plus subscription before they can play multiplayer games online, which wasn’t the case for the PlayStation 3. By including free access, it seems like Sony is trying to ease the transition for users who are upgrading. As the PlayStation 4 doesn’t allow users to play CDs or stream music and video from their own content libraries, a free month of Sony’s Music Unlimited service should keep buyers content while Sony introduces new entertainment apps to its services and hopefully adds that functionality in a later update.

Unfortunately, the offer is limited to PlayStation 4 buyers in the United States and Canada, and Sony hasn’t announced any plans to expand availability of the promotion to users in Europe or Asia.

Of course, this isn’t as flashy as the Thank You that Microsoft rolled out to users this week. That program included free copies of Killer Instinct, Xbox One consoles with launch titles, a year of Xbox LIVE and a year of Xbox Music. However, only a limited number of users received anything as part of that promotion, which Microsoft says was based on luck and other factors. Sony says all users can expect a voucher for these services inside of every PlayStation 4 box in the territories where it is offering them.

Read: Free Xbox One is Real Deal for Loyal Gamers

The PlayStation 4 launches on November 15th. At this time pre-orders remain sold out.