The rumors that Sony would participate in a “counter-attack” on the Xbox Game Pass work are not new. David Jaffe had already announced such a thing in April, who has proven to be well connected with Sony throughout his career. However, he was unable or unwilling to give specific details.
Jason Schreier out Bloomberg come back to that today. According to his report, Sony is planning a new subscription service for the popular Xbox Game Pass. The project would be run internally, codenamed Spartacus, and should be implemented in the spring of 2022.
The core of the service is a catalog of modern and classic games for a monthly fee. So in general what the Xbox Game Pass offers. In addition, the service will use the two previous subscription models PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now merge. We wrote a column about this in 2019.
Bloomberg claims to have documents showing that they want to keep the PlayStation Plus branding and instead phase out PlayStation Now. Plans for this may not be final yet, but there are currently three phases.
Three subscription levels with different values
In the first phase, users will get the existing PlayStation Plus benefits. A second level would offer a large catalog of PS4 and PS5 games. And the third phase also brings demos, streaming and a library of classics from PSone to PS3 and PSP.
The Xbox Game Pass is described by many as the closest model “Netflix for Games” currently comes to. According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the service is here currently 18 million subscribers. Phil Spencer recently called the Game Pass “very, very durable”. Xbox is now building the entire strategy around the Game Pass.
Compared to PlayStation Plus and Nintendo Switch Online, there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of subscriber numbers. The competing services (currently) have a different focus, but Nintendo has 32 million subscriptions and Sony has 47 million subscriptions.
Images: God of War, Sony
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