by
William D’Angelo
, posted 18 hours ago / 2,390 Views
There was a rumor late last year that Sony Interactive Entertainment plans to introduce a new subscription service with the codename of Spartacus that is meant to be a rival to Xbox Game Pass in Spring 2022.
The plan is to combine PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now into a single service that will come in three tiers. The first tier includes existing PlayStation Plus benefits, the second includes a large catalog of PlayStation 4 and, eventually, PlayStation 5 titles, while the third includes extended demos, game streaming, and a library of classic PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and PSP games.
Head of Xbox Phil Spencer in an interview with IGN has reacted to the rumor of PlayStation working on a rival to Xbox Game Pass.
“As you know so many of these things actually intertwine with themselves, from [backwards compatibility] in terms of a way of building out a library of games that we have shipping on PC and console simultaneously […] knowing that Game Pass is gonna come and we wanna bring Game Pass to multiple platforms – all of these decisions kind of stack on top of themselves,” said Spencer.
“I don’t mean it to sound like we’ve got it all figured out, but I think the right answer is allowing your customers to play the games they wanna play, where they wanna play them, and giving them choice about how they build their library, and being transparent with them about what our plans are in terms of our PC initiatives and our cross-gen initiatives and other things.
“So when I hear others doing things like Game Pass or coming to PC, it makes sense to me because I think that’s the right answer.”
Spencer added that Sony potentially working on its own version of Game Pass doesn’t mean Xbox was right, but if an “inevitability” of where the industry was heading.
“I don’t really look at it as validation,” said Spencer. “I actually, when I’m talking to our teams, I talk about it as an inevitability. So for us, we should continue to innovate, continue to compete, because the things that we’re doing might be advantages that we have in the market today, but they’re just based on us going first, not that we’ve created something that no one else can go create.
“I like it because it feeds our energy on what are the next things that we should be working on as we continue to build out the things that we’ve done in the past. Because I think the right answer is to ship great games, ship them on PC, ship them on console, ship them on cloud, make them available Day 1 in the subscription. And I expect that’s what our competitor will do.”
A life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let’s Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.