When Will Playstation Get Its Version Of Xbox Game Pass
Video game fans were happy to see Sony buying the creators of Halo as a counter-attack against Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but let's not forget there's an older and more serious problem in dire need of a quick response – the Xbox Game Pass. To push back, Sony announced at the end of 2021 that in spring 2022, we'd see the release of Project Spartacus, Sony's new subscription service that'll hopefully not share the fate of the Roman gladiator it was named after.
I'm not a Microsoft sponsor, but it's pretty hard to argue against wanting a service such as the Xbox game pass. For a small monthly fee, players have unlimited access to many of the Xbox's hottest titles.
Any skeptic reading this might think that “many” doesn't include the actual hottest titles, but no, the campaign of Halo Infinite, Microsoft's biggest title ever, could be accessed for 1$ per month for the first three months – and the multiplayer was completely free. That's a deal so good you nearly have to ask yourself how Microsoft manages to stay afloat – at least until you learn that Microsoft's fortune goes a little beyond the game's industry.
The Xbox Gamepass began back in 2017, and Sony could easily shrug it off back then because the competition's offering of an unlimited amount of games mostly for free isn't very scary when the competition barely has any big exclusives, but since then Microsoft has been pulling a Disney and acquiring many big players in the dev world. Sony, on the other hand, only has Playstation Now, a cloud gaming server meant to play older games, and Playstation Plus, a subscription service that's pretty scammy.
The service claims that, in exchange for a monthly fee, players are given 2 games that they get to keep forever. To begin with, that wouldn't be enough to compete with getting “all of the games”, but it's even worse. PS Plus doesn't really give players any games ever – they only get to keep the games for as long as they're paying for the service. If you subscribe to the service today because you like this month's game, then cancel the subscription, you'll only ever get to play the game again if you re-subscribe. Sony seems to want to kill off PsNow and PS Plus to get them replaced with Spartacus, and I gotta say that the day can't come soon enough – even if Spartacus ends up being crap.
Top Image: Microsoft
