After months of rumors, Sony has officially unveiled its new version of the PlayStation Plus service. Long-billed by some as the company's answer to Xbox Game Pass, it's not a huge surprise that when "Project Spartacus" was announced, anyone in the gaming community couldn't be blamed if their response to the announcement was a degree of disappointment.
That's not to say that what the new version of Playstation Plus has to offer can't be a game-changer in the near future. The fact that people might have been paying for two separate services in PS Plus and PS Now, and will now find it quite a bit easier to navigate these services once they're combined, means the move by Sony is a good one. However, that alone is nothing close to earth-shattering, and there were some who thought that when Spartacus finally launched, it would indeed be the kind of service that would really give Microsoft something to think about.
It's pretty clear that while there's nothing inherently wrong with the way Sony is going about rolling out the new PlayStation Plus changes, there are some questions as to why they chose to go about it. This new subscription model is indeed not going to be an Xbox Game Pass killer; it's not even clear if it's going to be a real rival.
PlayStation Plus: Racing From Behind
Combining PS Now and PlayStation Plus is actually quite similar to what Xbox did when it launched Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. It makes quite a bit of sense to put the game streaming service and the game subscription services together, if for no other reason, than to make it easier on their customers. It's honestly a bit surprising it took this long for Project Spartacus to become a reality when thinking about it in that regard. It seems like it could have been something Sony did almost immediately after Xbox Game Pass Ultimate was officially rolled out. There's also an argument to be made that had Sony struck when the iron was hot, it might not have lost so much ground to Game Pass.
In some regards, Microsoft has actually captured that sector of this particular market, because anything that comes after it comes off as a competitor. Before Spartacus was even announced, it was looked at as the rival to the Microsoft service, and now it makes all the sense in the world that the two offerings would be compared side by side. Such a comparison appears to be a detriment to Sony, but Sony's approach to the PlayStation Plus changes is more purposeful.
Sony might have thought that having a couple of different price points to offer would be even more attractive to potential PlayStation Plus tiered subscribers. That's not even a particularly bad idea, as it might have been able to capture subscribers who weren't willing to go all in at once. The problem is that the lowest tier that still allows users to stream or download games for no extra charge just happens to be the same $14.99 price point as the monthly charge for the Xbox Game Pass.
According to Sony, the PlayStation Plus Extra tier offers access to more than 400 PS4 and PS5 games. That alone is enough to compete with Game Pass for sure, but it's not enough to beat it, even if that means that it might be offering a few more games than what Microsoft has on offer.
The next tier, called PlayStation Plus Premium, offers up another 300 games. These include PS3, PS2, and PSP games. So on the one hand, users who decide to get this level of tier are absolutely going to get games that they cannot play anywhere else, unless they own one of those much older consoles. On the other hand, Sony is charging $3 extra a month for that catalog. It's a bit surprising that at least out the gate, to really try and make up some ground between itself and Game Pass, this new highest tier wasn't offered at the $14.99 price tag and the mid-level tier offered for a bit less.
Sony could eventually drive up the price of the highest tier. Sony could even do something to explain the price hike away by adding PS Vita games to its subscription service catalog. As things are currently shaking out, it's going to be interesting to see how diverse the adoption numbers are between the two tiers; especially after Sony has phased out the people that are automatically boosted to the premium level as long as their PS Now subscription is still active.
No Day-One Releases Could Be a Dealbreaker
One of the most surprising announcements Sony made when the PS Plus tiers were announced is that the service won't include day-one Sony games. Jim Ryan explained this approach away as saying that the company believes that putting first-party games on PS Plus could make those games "suffer." He went on to say that PlayStation has never been all that keen on this kind of move, and it remains down on such a decision.
It's hard to know for sure, purely from a financial standpoint, whether Microsoft adding games like MLB The Show 21 to Game Pass on day-one was a smart decision. However, it's clear that the company doesn't regret it all that much considering it's doing the same with MLB The Show 22.
Sony didn't have a way to counter Xbox Game Pass being the only subscription service of its kind with PlayStation's own, very popular baseball franchise available on day-one. Even if the PS Plus Tiers aren't available when MLB The Show launches on April 5, having it there when the platform releases would be one way to try and draw in some fans.
Sony clearly feels as though offering titles like God of War Ragnarok or Forspoken on the PS Plus service on day-one could make them suffer somehow. Perhaps it thinks it will be the games that come after them that will actually suffer. It's hard to tell exactly what the thinking is here without a much deeper dive into what's going through executives' heads. However, it's a pretty safe bet that if this new service does struggle out of the gate and never turns into the Xbox Game Pass "killer" some thought it could be. The pricing plan and the refusal to offer up Sony's biggest first-party games at launch will be big reasons why.
The new Playstation Plus tiered program will arrive in June 2022.