According to Bloomberg, people familiar with Sony’s plans
believe it’s going to merge its current subscription services for PlayStation
into a single one. The upcoming Xbox Game Pass-like subscription service,
currently codenamed ‘Spartacus’ at Sony, will feature a catalog of modern and
classic games.
As of now, Sony offers two subscription services for
PlayStation users: PlayStation Plus (required for most online multiplayer
games) and PlayStation Now (offering a list of games to download and play
from). According to the latest news, both of these services will be merged to
create one like Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass. Moreover, Sony is likely to keep
the PlayStation Plus branding for the new service.
PlayStation Plus – codename Spartacus
The upcoming service by Sony, which is being worked upon
behind closed doors under the codename Spartacus, is expected to have three
tiers. One of these tiers might offer what the current PlayStation Plus offers.
Another tier would encompass a list of PS4 and PS5 games. Lastly, the third
tier would include “extended demos, game streaming, and a library of classic
PS1, PS2, PS3, and PSP games.” According to Bloomberg, Sony is likely to make
the Spartacus service available on PS4 and PS5 as well.
Sony Spartacus release date
It’s likely the new rebranded PlayStation Plus service
Spartacus will arrive sometime in the spring of next year. Moreover, Sony is
also “putting resources in cloud gaming,” as reported by Bloomberg. Considering
how Sony’s PS Now is lagging behind in the cloud gaming market, this can be
owed to the strong competition given by substantial strides made by the likes
of Amazon Luna and NVIDIA GeForce Now with its RTX 30 series being incorporated
into cloud gaming
Will Sony have day one releases on the new service?
Meanwhile, the details on Sony’s new project Spartacus are
still unclear. For instance, we still don’t know if Sony will bring first-party
exclusives on the new subscription service on day one, like Xbox Game Pass.
While all these will sound alluring to PlayStation users, nothing is set in
stone yet; the details might change once the service is out.
However, Sony has plans to take on Microsoft’s Xbox Game
Pass with Spartacus regardless of CEO Jim Ryan’s remarks last year. Ryan said
last year that Sony wouldn’t “go down the road of putting new release titles
into a subscription model. These games cost many millions of dollars, well over
$100 million, to develop. We just don’t see that as sustainable.”
While things surely have changed since Ryan’s big statement.
For starters, the PS5, despite lacking a good subscription model like its
counterpart, has outsold Xbox Series X.
On the flip side, Xbox has gathered more than 18 million
subscribers for Xbox Game Pass, and that is a lucrative deal right there where
Sony also wishes to dip its toes into the business.