According to people familiar with Sony’s plans, as well as a new report from Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, Sony is currently planning a subscription service for PlayStation that is planned to compete with the Xbox Games Pass. He also states within his reporting, that this plan was outlined in documents reviewed by Bloomberg.
Disclaimer – This information has not been verified on our end, therefore we cannot confirm this as factual.
The service is reportedly codenamed Sparticus and will allow PlayStation players to pay a monthly subscription fee for access to a catalog of both modern and classic titles. This service will most likely launch on both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Since the supply chain, and chip shortage has yet to be rectified and most experts say it will continue well into 2022, it is a smart decision to include both consoles in this plan.
The service is expected to be launched sometime in the spring of 2022 and will merge the two existing services on the console, PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now. PlayStation Plus is the online service required to play most games on the console, while PlayStation Now was a streaming service for games on the console which ironically pre-dated the Xbox Game Pass but focused primarily on older games, mainly those on the PlayStation 3 that could not be played on the PlayStation 4. According to documentation seen by Bloomberg, Sony Plans to phase out PlayStation Now and add its new service under the PlayStation Plus banner.
While nothing has yet been finalized, that same documentation suggests that the service will have three tiers to its service. The first outlined simply seems to be the PlayStation Plus service as it exists now. The second would add a catalog of PlayStation 4 games at first, with eventually it also including PlayStation 5 games as well. It appears that the company still does not want to embrace the day one attitude that Xbox has adopted, though based on early sales of Ghost of Tsushima and The Last of Us Part II, both of which lacked multiplayer at launch, it is hard to blame the. The third tier would include extended demos, streaming capabilities, and a library of games from PS1, PS2, PS3, and PSP consoles. With streaming a basic and integral part of the current Game Pass model, it might be better served as a basic part of this model as well.
The PlayStation 4 dominated console sales during either generation of consoles where it competed against the Xbox One. Xbox had to overcome several issues during the launching of the consoles, such as the original plan for the console to be always online, game sharing complications, focus on the Kinect as an integral part, and lack of exclusives. While these hurdles were never fully overcome, the company turned this around with a focus on the subscription-based model that has to date garnered over 18 million subscriptions. Players get day one exclusives and more across Xbox consoles, PC, tablets, and phones and since the company continues to buy studios this value will only grow. Sony has been urged since the creation of Game Pass to counter it, with the company now looking poised to at least begin the process of doing so.
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