Microsoft made an interesting move within the video game industry. Rather than having players purchase their first-party exclusives and a slew of third-party titles, Microsoft introduced a subscription-style service. Known as Xbox Game Pass, this subscription would grant players the ability to gain a large catalog of video game titles with a monthly fee. It’s proven to be quite popular especially now that Microsoft has really started to pack their first-party studios up.
However, when Sony was approached about a similar service, it wasn’t met with a positive response. In fact, it was earlier this year that Sony’s PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan made note that there wouldn’t be a service which would deliver new first-party video game titles on a subscription service. Their reasoning was that these games cost millions to develop and they didn’t foresee a subscription service to be sustainable.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has brought Xbox Game Pass to not only their Xbox console platforms but also the PC platform and even Android smartphones. Now with Microsoft having access to ZeniMax Media and their line of studios, we can expect Xbox to push out quite a few diverse video game titles along with beloved IPs. This move alone may have swayed Sony to rethink their position on subscription services.
“There is actually news to come, but just not today. We have PlayStation Now which is our subscription service, and that is available in a number of markets.”
Jim Ryan
Recently Sony PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan spoke with TASS when the question of how Sony will respond to Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service. According to Jim Ryan, there is news to come, but there’s nothing to announce at the moment. Now the question will be how Sony will actually deliver in terms of a competitive service especially with Microsoft having its hand more development studio teams. The mention of PlayStation Now may indicate that the service will be tweaked in some way but for now, we’ll have to wait and see.