Over the last few weeks, rumors have been running rampant that Sony is looking to take it to Xbox Game Pass with an upgraded tiered subscription service that would combine and improve on PS Plus and PS Now. Obviously, players have plenty of opinions on this, but what does Xbox and Game Pass mastermind Phil Spencer think about the potential competition? Well, in typical Phil fashion, he’s looking at the big picture, and thinks it’s the “right answer” for PlayStation.
I don’t mean it to sound like we’ve got it all figured out, but I think the right answer is allowing your customers to play the games they wanna play, where they wanna play them, and giving them choice about how they build their library, and being transparent with them about what our plans are in terms of our PC initiatives and our cross-gen initiatives and other things. So, when I hear others doing things like Game Pass or coming to PC, it makes sense to me because I think that’s the right answer.
Okay, so Spencer’s fine with the competition, but surely he’s patting himself on the back a little bit that Sony is following his lead yet again? Maybe privately, but according to Spencer, subscription services like Game Pass were an “inevitability” and Xbox is focused on pursuing new innovations…
I don’t really look at it as validation. I actually, when I’m talking to our teams, I talk about it as an inevitability. So for us, we should continue to innovate, continue to compete, because the things that we’re doing might be advantages that we have in the market today, but they’re just based on us going first, not that we’ve created something that no one else can go create. It feeds our energy on what are the next things that we should be working on as we continue to build out the things that we’ve done in the past. Because I think the right answer is to ship great games, ship them on PC, ship them on console, ship them on cloud, make them available Day 1 in the subscription. And I expect that’s what our competitor will do.
Sony has yet to officially announce their new subscription service, but with pre-paid PS Now cards being pulled from shelves, it’s expected to be revealed soon.
