PlayStation Plus Extra, the middle tier, is the one most like Game Pass and where it is easiest to compare the two. PlayStation Plus Premium, the highest of the three tiers, is off to a decent start, especially for PlayStation-only players, but being decent is a bit of a harder sell when Xbox’s alternative has had so long to build to its legendary status. While subscription plans like always evolve and grow, this move is obviously a ploy to compete with Xbox’s tremendously successful Game Pass. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.After years of having two different services that served different purposes, Sony has finally merged PlayStation Now and PlayStation Plus into a single three-tiered service. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls. It's a complicated question, and while not unthinkable, my guess is that we’re not going to see it, and Sony and Nintendo will keep being the two places you cannot play games on Game Pass in the larger tech landscape.įollow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. And yet, I don’t see Sony creating a real Game Pass competitor any time soon either.

I could be wrong, and who knows, maybe they’ve already made that offer and Sony has shot them down for the reasons I mentioned, but ultimately, this feels too messy to work. My gut feeling is that this would be more of an advantage for Sony than it would be for Microsoft, if it did happen, and I think that despite all Microsoft’s talk about wanting Game Pass and their titles everywhere, they still may draw the line at PlayStation. This would also complicate sales of third party games that are both for sale on PlayStation and offered free on Game Pass. Game Pass chokes out your own subscription/streaming ambitions. This would cut into PS Plus and PS Now or whatever Spartacus combination that happens between those soon. Sony: It would be somewhat humiliating to recognize the dominance of Xbox Game Pass by accepting it into the PlayStation ecosystem, essentially surrendering the entire subscription service side of the business. You expand Game Pass’s reach while possibly killing off the entire need for an Xbox at all. You have just paid $80 billion for a bunch of developers and all those games are now going directly on your competitor’s platform. Microsoft: Renders the actual Xbox more or less totally inert, because a Game Pass-accessible PlayStation is just…empirically better, given that all Sony’s offerings are there as well. But I think there’s a way of looking at this that’s Lose-Lose instead:

Playstation pass games