Rumor: PlayStation's Game Pass Rival 'Getting Pretty Close to Launching' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 March 2022 / 3,359 Views
VentureBeat's Jeff Grubb speaking in his latest GrubbSnax show on Giant Bomb has reported PlayStation's Xbox Game Pass rival, codenamed Project Spartacus, is getting close to launching.
"It’s probably getting pretty close to this actually launching, something’s probably going to happen by the end of this month and I don’t think that necessarily means publicly, I think in terms of the internal milestone of where the service needs to be," said Grubb via VideoGamesChronicle.
Grubb said Spartacus will have three tiers - Essential priced at $10 a month, Extra for $13, and Premium for $16. He does say the prices he saw "could be a placeholder."
Grubb talked about what he has heard will come in each of the three tiers.
"For premium, $16 a month… do you get full games? Not really, kinda… it’s like EA Play. You get full game trials. I don’t know if that’s for every single game that comes out, but it seems like that." Grubb said. "You also get classic games and streaming, none of the other tiers will have cloud streaming, you also get classic games.
"I don’t know what classic games means, but I do know that it’s a major part of this premium tier. So you have game trials, classic games and streaming on this premium tier.
"For the extra tier, you get a ‘downloadable game catalogue’ anything on PSNow that was downloadable, seems like it would be in here. 250, 300 games, something like that. You don’t get cloud streaming, but you do get 300 games you can download."
"Essential is PS Plus with the monthly games, just like you know it today," he added.
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.
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If it doesn't receive all 1st party games at launch, its not a competitor.
Wow... so he knows actually nothing concrete? Nice!
Waiting to see how many will say he is credible and that means we will hear about it by the end of month.
If there is a yearly discount I could see myself signing up for this.
Our weekly rumor on the Spartacus and this time he doesn't even say he heard from any source it is just he speculating by himself.
I am more concerned about the $10 per month. hope they dont remove the $60 per year. I am gonna be pissed. I dont care about the new service for the same reason I refuse to support gamepass.
I still don't get why people think they need to. Stick to what they are doing, just like Nintendo. Release new games as you normally would. PS+ with games for those customers, PS Now for streaming. If anything they should just make Now more appealing and I'm not sure just putting new releases on it is the way to do that.
I'd still prefer just to pay £35 a year for PS+ with it's games and buy a few permanently. Infact, I'd prefer if we had free online but you know...
Nice. PS plus essential is basically what we’re used to $9.99. The PS Plus extra adds the downloadable version of PS Now @ $13. Then PS plus premium you get everything before but the added benefit of the full version of PS now plus full game trials @ $16. My assumption is if there is day and date it’ll be 3rd party, AA 1ST party, timed exclusives and any game that is predominately multiplayer. I don’t see Sony’s first party storey driven games lunching on any of these day 1 but I could be wrong. I’m thinking though Sony likes the retail launch.
To me at least, if the Premium/$16 tier is only game trials, then it better be all major games launching on PlayStation, from third- or first-party, no exceptions. Xbox Games Pass is $15/mo and gives you all first-party games, the full versions, along with a really great selection of third-party titles. So for Sony to be priced the same or higher, it better include all titles. Then the pitch on it can be try any game in the entire PS5 catalog, so you know which ones you want to spend $70 on to keep playing.
Are they doubling the price of PSPlus?
Yeah, I'm definitely going to wait and see what Sony has in store. If the aspect regarding the classic games being tied to the top tier only is right though, that's extremely disappointing that Sony is taking the Nintendo route of accessing their classic games. But then again, I never would have expected Sony to even give an option to access their back catalogue anymore after the Vita. So I'm holding off judgement till they actually show Spartacus off.
Not really. You get access to Nintendo classic games at $20/year, whereas here you get access to Sony classic games (which I gotta think isn't even close to comparable to Nintendo's classics even just the NES & SNES) for $16/month rather than year. Nintendo's price barrier to classic games is an order of magnitude lower than Playstation's, based on this article. So they aren't going the Nintendo route of cheap access, they are going a new route of expensive access.
For sure! What I meant more was the way we access them. In this case, via a subscription service rather than a virtual console where we can purchase them.
You do know that even if this rumor is true it isn't only PS1 classics for 16/month right?
How many games are on the $20 Nintendo service? Serious question, I never paid attention to it because it didn't seem interesting to me.
Many great classic titles, but overall a pretty thin catalogue. The included DLCs for some Switch games can make the Expansion Pass worth it, depending how many are included in a years. Otherwise, the Expansion Pass is will appear to be overpriced when compared to what the competition offers, which includes multiple recent games (compared to Nintendo’s older console title).
Still, the base subscription is cheap enough if you enjoy their old classics, and want to play them legally.
I am subscribed to the family membership for me and my son, and that’s so far more than enough for us, since neither of us enjoy the N64 offerings all that much.
Now… if they included a Gamecube (or Dreamcast!!) tier…That would be a different story.
Gamepass promotes laziness on developer look at 343 releasing an unfinished halo?
Release multiplayer first for free and then campaign with no other game modes forge and local coop haha,
Support 1st party studios that make games and makes them worth it like horizon forbidden west or Pokemon Arceus.
Essay Pro