When Phil Spencer sat at the helm of the Xbox brand, he began to slowly save what was left behind by the now infamous Don Mattrick and from year to year he was rebuilding Microsoft’s ruined reputation in the video game industry. One of the most important elements of the company’s strategy has become, inter alia, a greater focus on the services and games themselves, rather than on the hardware, which in 2017 was shown in a very nice way by the new “green” service entitled Xbox Game Pass.
Netflix for games
Microsoft’s service is, of course, not the first of its kind in the industry – earlier, Electronic Arts showed its Origins Access and EA Access, which operated on similar principles, but on a smaller scale. The vision of accessing over 100 great games was very tempting from the very first announcement, but many people approached it with great reserve, because there was a catch here. Rising fees, small and meaningless turkeys, and finally the widespread removal of popular titles, because the license for their presence is too expensive – these and other concerns accompanied the skeptics of the idea. Of course, all this was exaggerated, because as we know well today, Game Pass receives both small turkeys and giant AAA games, and if that was not enough, many of them subscribe on the day of their premiere!
It is true that Microsoft had a tiny slip-up attempting to raise the price of Xbox Live Gold, but it was a really tiny crap that was dissolved and apologized after just one day. However, this does not change the fact that Game Pass is an absolutely great and very profitable service – for players, developers and publishers. Even if you want to buy a game that is in Game Pass, thanks to the subscription you have an exclusive discount for it. As if that was not enough, as part of the Microsoft subscription, we also have access to the entire library of EA Play games, which is also a fantastic move – especially since it does not require additional fees from us.
PlayStation with a Plus
When the Xbox 360 took off with the controversial subscription for its time, forcing us to pay for it if we wanted to play games over the Internet, PlayStation responded with an absolutely brilliant, completely optional subscription known as PlayStation Plus. It is thanks to him that we can pick up a few additional games each month to fill our library, and thus play really nice titles for a relatively low price. While for many years it was a very good solution and put the shoulders of the competing Gold, since the PS4 debut, the offers have evened out a bit, and since 2017 Microsoft has a significant advantage.
As part of the Game Pass Ultimate, we have access to over several hundred games for PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S, gaming in the cloud, EA Play and Xbox Live Gold – all for PLN 54.99 per month. PlayStation Plus costs PLN 20 a month, and the only thing that offers us is access to an average of 3 games a month, online gameplay and possible free add-on packages for well-known free-to-play games, which Gold itself also has. included in XGP Ultimate.
Since the debut of PlayStation 5, Sony has probably wanted to face Game Pass, but it’s doing it terribly inept at the moment. Why? PlayStation Plus Collection is just a joke. While Xbox offers all of its productions in XGP and regularly adds new premieres there, Sony threw only “oldies” from PS4 into the collection, omitting a lot of proprietary exclusive productions, filling its collection with games like Battlefield 1, Mortal Kombat X or Black Opsem 3. Was it really so hard to throw yourself at Battlefield V, Mortal Kombat 11, or even Black Opsa 4?
I really counted on the fact that for the PS5 anniversary the Japanese would expand the collection with a few new items, and instead we got a dramatically deteriorating offer of the regular Plus. The last month has clearly shown it. Mortal Shell without an update to PS5, a defective Challenger Edition Godfall, or the same games from PlayStation VR again. Well, it looks bad compared to what the competition is doing. We have a PlayStation Plus Video Pass in Poland, but this service is also, so to speak, poor. First of all, most of these movies and series can be watched elsewhere, and in addition, the already microscopic library of materials from time to time leaves productions selected by Sony. I used it once and I prefer to run Netflix, HBO or Amazon.
Now or never!
Sony has a lot of potential for the development of PlayStation Plus and cannot really argue with it, because it will start losing the console race. We can already see what happened to Nintendo Switch Online, when the company unreasonably expanded its offer with a rather expensive extension. The owners of the PlayStation brand have a lot of cool aces up their sleeve and they should definitely use them.
If the “blue” team is really getting ready to respond to the Game Pass, they must really do it in an epic way, otherwise they will always be behind when it comes to the quality of their services. In my opinion, it should look something like this. At E3 or at some other major event, Sony presents something like “PlayStation Access”, a brand new subscription that enters the Sony ecosystem. As part of it, we should get access to PlayStation Plus, PlayStation Now (or its new replacement), PlayStation Video Pass and a special library of games similar to Game Pass.
Currently, PS Now has as many as 800 titles ranging from PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 4, but the service itself is unforgivably expensive, which means that there is little demand for it. If PlayStation Access included all 800 titles and expanded further with Sony’s exclusive games on their release date and other older titles, it would definitely be a serious competition for Game Pass. An additional catch could be the fact that PS Access owners still pay PLN 249 for new games, instead of PLN 339, which is slowly becoming the new price standard for the AAA segment.
And what could the price of it all be? Since Xbox Game Pass Ultimate costs $ 14.99, PS Access could cost the same or a dollar less – such as $ 13.99 and PLN 49.99 every month in Poland.
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