Spartacus is an evolution of PlayStation Plus with three tiers. It currently calls those tiers Essential, Extra, and Premium — although those names could change between now and when the service launches. The subscription for these programs is monthly and starts at $10 and goes up to $16. And what do each of those tiers get you? Here’s the current plan:
Monthly games
Game catalogue
Streaming
Classic games
Game trials
Price
PS+ Essential
$10
PS+ Extra
$13
PS+ Premium
$16
PS+ Essential - $10
is the PS+ that you already know. For $10 per month, you get monthly games that you can add to your library. This works a lot like it already works today.
PS+ Extra - $13
meanwhile, gets you the monthly games and a game catalogue for $13 per month. The game catalogue is a library of hundreds of older, downloadable games. This seems like Sony ripped the download catalogue out of PS Now and popped it into PS+ instead.
PS+ Premium - $16
gets you all of the above and then everything else for $16 per month. That everything else includes PS Now’s streaming capabilities. You also get a library of “classic games” as well as a new “game trials” feature. Game trials enables you to download and start playing the full versions of new PlayStation games. This likely has a time-limit function, which is similar to how game trials work on the EA Play service from Electronic Arts.
Sony is moving into a testing phase for Spartacus in the next few weeks. And it could announce the details of its new membership program in March — although that’ll depend on whether it is ready to roll out the service.
“and these features should make PS Plus look much stronger in comparison to Xbox Game Pass. While Sony will not include full versions of its blockbuster games in PS Plus on day one, game trials will at least give a bigger audience a chance to sample those games.”
Just wait for it to roll out and people will praise it, claiming it is better than Game Pass. With enough FUD, Sony might even succeed in making believe that Game Pass also has nothing more than trials
Comparing to Game Pass, the only better thing is that PS+ Essential offers Gold (while Game Pass does not offer it). This Gold requirement is becoming a burden to be honest. But at the same time, it is a very good revenue stream (Sony did it smarter in that regard as it extended the service without cutting off this revenue stream).
I’d they offer one year memberships at half price like PS- they will do okay. If they pull an Xbox and use this as an opportunity to phase out PS+ discounts I will lol.
