PlayStation ‘is working on a counterpunch to Xbox Game Pass’, claims God of War creator

Third party games…but yeah, the same 3rd party games gamepass will have.

And 2-3 is being generous. Its 2 at max.

My question is how you’d do it WITHOUT MULTIPLAYER?

When your games are one and done, why shouldn’t i get a 2 week PSNow sub, play the game and then just buy it when its cheap in 8 months?

Yup, there’s a lot of things working against Sony if they try to copy gamepass:

  • Need to build a userbase before you can justify putting your AAAA games on there for “free”
  • Will be the Hulu to Xbox’s Netflix, needing to convince people to double down on subscriptions
  • Would need greater variety in games, and at least a single game that people play longer than 2 weeks
  • Would need greater quantity of games, as the risk of people gaming the subscription system is much higher when you just need to pay $15 whenever sad dad game and cool open world comes out once to twice a year
  • Would be in a constant moneyhat battle with a company with more money and more hats
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they’ll probably also add all their older games, but I definitely think the appeal is gonna just be “you pay a reasonable price for all our games every year” and that reasonable price is either the same price as how much all their 1st party games released that year cost, or slightly less.

I don’t think it’s a matter of paying it month to month as tbh, I expect them to make you pay for an entire year upfront (even though I said in the original post, it would be monthly lmao, maybe I’m not thinking about it too well) and the reason to compell you to do so, would be to shave a bit of money off… ie effectively make it that your paying 50-60 per game, instead of 70 each.

Sony’s output isn’t crazy, but they can definitely release at least 3 games a year. Basically I don’t think of it like a subscription as much as I do like a season pass.

I wouldn’t underestimate Sony mainly because they have a user base of around 125 million between the PS4 and PS5.

Because of this, and the unparalleled loyalty among their fans, it wouldn’t take long for them to hit 25 million subscribers. A $10 a sub that would mean $3 billion dollars of revenue a year, which could most definitely pay for third-party content on the platform and expand their current offerings. I can also see them coming up with their own perks but tie it to the most popular games like offering a hundred V-bucks every month or something like that.

I also don’t see their games being day one on that service but I don’t think their fans will care. Frankly speaking a lot of loyalists (for any company, really) have a lower bar. But the idea that the back catalog would be there is enough for a lot of people.

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The user base is absolutely the strength Sony has, but the question of how to funnel them into a new subscription is still tricky. It certainly seems like Sony’s userbase is currently subsidizing a lot of devs’ decisions to go onto gamepass, especially sports games which are some of the most important non-first party titles. Basically MLB being sold on PS5 makes it less risky for MLB to put their game on gamepass, and it may be tough to get those devs to go from one foot in the pool to jumping fully in.

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Of course sony has to counter gamepass. Just like MS had to counter sony’s lead in first party studios by buying other studios. BTW, sony just got an infusion of cash. Will it impact game division?

Netflix Nabs Post-PVOD Streaming Rights to Sony’s Feature Films in Multi-Year Deal | Hollywood Reporter

Most likely that would go back to the parent company to be spread among where it was deemed necessary. Typically, it would go back to Sony Pictures.

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Anything less than Sony having their exclusives in their subscription service day one kind of defeats the purpose in trying to have a Game Pass killer because those exclusives would be what gives them the opportunity to do just that. Also, what would it be? PS Now 2.0??? LOL.

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Sony doesn’t have the cash to compete with Game Pass. They can’t afford to put their big budget games into something like Game Pass and certainly can’t afford to model of paying devs cash upfront like MS can, nor do they have the funds to go on shopping sprees to get teams in place internally that can keep the hits coming monthly. That all costs a wild amount of money.

I could see them putting their games on PS Now 6 months post launch perhaps, but they gotta first upgrade their infrastructure to stream PS5 games.

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I highly doubt this will end up being true, it will probably be an expansion of PS Now because there is no realm that Sony can invest as much money as MS at this point in studios, acquisitions, and a low cost service.

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that cash isn’t enough, MS is spending billions.

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I can’t see this happening if they’re not putting their first party games day one on the service. Seems unlikely to happen imo since their exclusives sell pretty well.

I don’t know if Sony has the cash to do this. Because at first, they will likely be losing money. That’s how subscription services work. And it seems Sony focuses quite a bit on the short-term rather than the long-term. If Sony does their own subscription service, it also means Microsoft will likely get more competitive, and Sony would probably not be able to catch up.

It’s always kind of weird to me that some people think Sony could flick a switch and have a Gamepass killer.

MS spent years building it up, getting contracts in place, building content pipelines and signing deals. They’ll have certain key things tied up even beyond this gen I’ll bet.

You can’t just have that in place overnight and if they had done anything concrete to this end already we would know. Even if they put all their games day one on it, they don’t have enough games, they are too similar and they have nothing multiplayer to keep people subscribed.

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Source: a Console warrior.

I don’t underestimate Sony, it’s a historic gaming company but subscription models need one key rule: if you can’t go everywhere, forget the idea.

Anyway, these are some weak points about Xbox game pass, future competitors can improve:

  • 1st party content.
  • Marketing.
  • Messy monthly catalog.

But I thought Jim said it was not sustainable?

Sony has one benefit, their fanboys are super loyal and there are millions of them. An inferior product will still captivate them. That is how it is and there is nothing we can do about it.

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For people like me who only uses the PS as an exclusive games console this would be great. Sub a couple of months over a generation and play the handful of games that I’m interested in. Would save a lot of money!

Not sure how that would benefit Sony though… but who cares :slight_smile:

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Never going to Happen

Sony said many times they cannot put 1st party AAA titles on a sub service. Same with Nintendo

This whole “were trying to compete with Gamepass” bollocks will be them rebranding or rebooting PSNow as some sort of a legacy platform for older games.

MS themselves can and will improve in the 1st party catalogue. Gamepass is still very new. it hasn’t hit anywhere near its peak. Netflix in its third year barely got going.

And MS’s competition is amazon/google etc… Not Sony and Nintendo. Those are hardware companies that simply cannot go all in on a sub service unless they partner up with a mega corp.