Rumors have been swirling as of late that Playstation is cooking up a service that aims to compete with the highly successful Xbox Game Pass. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier broke the news a few months ago, describing a service Playstation internally refers to as “Spartacus”, a multi-tiered subscription that bundles Playstation’s two existing services, Plus and Now.
IGN’s Ryan McCaffery recently spoke to Head of Xbox Phil Spencer about what he thought of the rumors, and Spencer had quite a bit to say.
Spencer says that “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.”
He goes onto say that “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.”
Game Pass has changed the way the games industry is moving forward, and as Spencer said, Playstation following suit is inevitable. It will be interesting to see how “Spartacus” is able to compete with Game Pass once it is announced.
Reports suggest Playstation is not planning to include their first party offerings into the service as they launch, a stark difference to Xbox’s own strategy. Whatever the competitors plans may be, it is clear that Phil Spencer and team are eager to compete.
