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Classic games will reportedly be ‘a major part’ of PlayStation’s Game Pass rival

Lunatic_Gamer

Gold Member
PlayStation-Store-b-1024x578.jpg


Speaking on his premium Giantbomb show Grubbsnax (paywalled, transcribed by VGC), VentureBeat’s Jeff Grubb claimed to have obtained new information on Sony‘s yet-to-be-announced subscription service.

“It’s probably getting pretty close to this actually launching, something’s probably going to happen by the end of this month and I don’t think that necessarily means publicly, I think in terms of the internal milestone of where the service needs to be,” Grubb said.

According to the journalist, Spartacus will be comprised of three tiers priced at up to $16 a month.

“Right now they are called ‘essential’, ‘extra’ and ‘premium’,” Grubb claimed. “The pricing, again could be a placeholder, but the pricing is $10 a month for essential, $13 a month for extra and $16 a month for premium.”

“For premium, $16 a month… do you get full games? Not really, kinda… it’s like EA Play. You get full game trials. I don’t know if that’s for every single game that comes out, but it seems like that.” Grubb said. While PlayStation has offered game trials in the past for certain titles, Grubb implies that all PlayStation first-party titles could offer these trials are part of the premium tier.

Grubb continued: “You also get classic games and streaming, none of the other tiers will have cloud streaming, you also get classic games.”

He then expanded: “I don’t know what classic games means, but I do know that it’s a major part of this premium tier. So you have game trials, classic games and streaming on this premium tier”. PlayStation has been the notable exception in recent years when it comes to providing access to its huge back catalogue on modern platforms. While Xbox Series users can play certain games from as far back as the original Xbox, the PlayStation 5 can only play PlayStation 4 titles natively.

“For the extra tier, you get a ‘downloadable game catalogue’ anything on PSNow that was downloadable, seems like it would be in here” which Grubb has heard includes over “250, 300 games, something like that. You don’t get cloud streaming, but you do get 300 games you can download”.

 
ppl dont seem to realize u can get this with PSNow.....rn.

its just not great. Stream quality not as good as GamePass. Maybe a better or equal selection of games. But also a lot of shovelware and weeb ish
 

kingpotato

Ask me about my Stream Deck
I think he means for new games.
Yeah, that's what I understood it to mean. This is meant to be in direct competition with Gamepass which offers full access to new games. We'll have to wait for clarity from an official announcement because this is like the worst of all services cobbled together. Gamepass price with Nintendo level offerings?
 

yurinka

Member
If you only get trials of games for $16 a month, what is the fucking point of the service?
$16 would be for:
PS Plus + PS Plus Collection + over 1000 full games to stream via cloud gaming (PS1+PS2+PS3+PS4+PS5+PSP) in PS4/PS5/PC/mobile + a huge percent of them downloadable to play them natively in PS4/PS5 + game trials + oher perks.

Why do you guys keep calling this Gamepass competitor when it's not going to do the same thing not is it trying to?
Sony themselves have always said they wouldn't have a subscription where you could play games day one.
It will be a Gamepass competitor because both will be a games subscription with games to download or stream on multiple platforms and are also bundled with their online multiplayer subscription. In any case both Sony and MS subs have day one games and old games even if in a very diffrent proporion.

Obviously won't be 1:1 the same but will be pretty similar, same as when comparing consoles.

How about letting me keep using PSPLUS the way it is? I want things to stay the same because it fits my gaming style and frequency.
The $10/month tier of this new PS Plus service is supposed to be exactly the same PS Plus you already have. Same price and same content. Nobody will force you to pay $3/month more to have access to download hundreds of games.

All of that is kinda confusing. And why $16? And not $15?
Grubb copy pastes stuff he sees published elsewhere (in this case the Bloomberg Spartacus article) and mades up or guesses some extra stuff, in this case the prices. Pretty likely are totally false.
 
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PuffyCan

Member
Not if you look at, you know ...

Financials.
Consumers don't care about Sony financials, they care about features versus the competition and if they get less, they'll go with where they can get what they want.
The longer Sony waits to counter GamePass, the harder it'll get. Try competing for content when the competition has 7 times the number of subscriber, they have to find a way to close the gap.
 

kingpotato

Ask me about my Stream Deck
$16 would be for:
PS Plus + PS Plus Collection + over 1000 full games to stream via cloud gaming (PS1+PS2+PS3+PS4+PS5+PSP) in PS4/PS5/PC/mobile + a huge percent of them downloadable to play them natively in PS4/PS5 + game trials + oher perks.
Where does the 1000 number come from? I didn't see it in the OP and I didn't think PSNow had that many titles.
 

CatLady

Selfishly plays on Xbox Purr-ies X
Who knows if any of this is even true, but if it is how can it possibly be considered a Game Pass rival? More like an EA Play rival at $16 per month -- that's $1 more than Game Pass. Sounds like a real winner :pie_roffles: :pie_roffles: :pie_roffles:
 

Midn1ght

Member
“For premium, $16 a month… do you get full games? Not really, kinda… it’s like EA Play. You get full game trials.”

Does that include Playstation Plus?

They might go with something between 149.00-199.00 for 12 months Ultimate Premium including : PS Plus + PS Plus Collection + PS Classics + PS Now Streaming + Trials on new 1st party games.

Hmm...
Considering Season 3 GIF by Portlandia
 

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
So they're going the Nintendo route for classic games? Damn, that's a shame.
 

ErRor88

Member
Sony is looking to expand PlayStation Plus by introducing new features and by integrating elements from PlayStation Now. Bloomberg originally reported about these efforts — which Sony internally calls “Spartacus” — in December. But now GamesBeat can provide some more info on what these new offerings look like.

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 gamesGame catalogueStreamingClassic
games
Game trialsPrice
PS+ EssentialX$10
PS+ ExtraXX$13
PS+ PremiumXXXXX$16

PS+ Essential 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, 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 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.

Again, all of these prices and names could change. But this is the general outline of what to expect from Spartacus. 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.

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.


 
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yurinka

Member
Where does the 1000 number come from? I didn't see it in the OP and I didn't think PSNow had that many titles.
PS Now already has over 900 games, and according to the Bloomberg article from where most of this info comes from, they plan to add hundreds more, and on top of that there would be the PS Collection and PS Plus ones.

So they're going the Nintendo route for classic games? Damn, that's a shame.
No, they meant that simply will continue adding more games to PS Now, so it's catalog would go well beyond 1000 games. But now in addition to PS2, PS3 and PS4 games, it also would have PS1, PSP and PS5 games too. Now PS Now would also include the game trials and would be bundled with PS Plus (and PS Collection). Pretty different than Nintendo.


Does that include Playstation Plus?

They might go with something between 149.00-199.00 for 12 months Ultimate Premium including : PS Plus + PS Plus Collection + PS Classics + PS Now Streaming + Trials on new 1st party games.

Hmm...
Considering Season 3 GIF by Portlandia
Yes. According to Bloomberg the most expensive tier ($16 according to Grubb) would basically be PS Plus (so PS Collection, discounts etc) + PS Now (now with way more games from all PS home console generations and PSP) + 'extended game demos'. This price would be only for 1 month. Sony has packs of 3 and 12 months that are way cheaper than multiply the monthly pricing by 12. So maybe a year is $149 or slightly more, yes.

The longer Sony waits to counter GamePass, the harder it'll get. Try competing for content when the competition has 7 times the number of subscriber, they have to find a way to close the gap.
As of now Sony has the double of subscribers compared to MS. It's MS who has to close the gap, not Sony.

As it stands I pay 100 pounds a year forpsplus and now. But according to grubby, cloud streaming is only included in the premium tier, $16. So for me to get psplus, monthly games, and psnow, (streaming and DL) I will have to pay more to get the same equvilent with the new scheme?

Doesn't make sense.
But still psnow but pay more money to play old games?
The current pricing it's $10 for PS Plus and $10 for PS Now. If this is real, instead of paying $20 for both you'll pay $16 and will get PS Plus, PS Now (with more games from more platforms) and the demos plus more stuff.

So if this is real and Grubb and Bloomberg aren't lying again, you'll pay less money for more content.
 
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jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
So they’re doubling the price of PS+ as it stands for the essential tier? No way this is accurate
The month-to-month price is already $9.99. That's the sucker price for people who don't buy a year at a time ($59.99) or people who don't buy it during Black Friday for $30. Or the people who don't pay attention and just have their subscription auto-renew.

 
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Kokoloko85

Member
Unless I can download classic PS1, PS2 games Im not really interested.
And Im talking more the PS3 library of PS1/PS2 games, Ill sub for that. Not PS4’s lackluster PS2 games library
 
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Ezekiel_

Banned
I hope they keep the 12 month subscription plan. You can save a bit by buying yearly instead of monthly.

Sony should also leverage the fact that they own Sony Pictures and offer a catalogue of their movies/TV shows.

They could probably simplify their offering by only having two tiers, I'm not sure how they're going to distinguish the 'Game catalogue' versus the 'Game catalogue + streaming'.
 

Lunarorbit

Member
So ps plus as it's currently constituted would double in price? I've paid less than $60/year for ps plus forever. What if you have years stacked? Maybe they'll honor that and thats why we have the ps plus-essentials catogory.
 

Naked Lunch

Member
So I have to re-buy everything again.
Yea - no.

Glad I took the effort to set up my PS1 MODE and PS2 OPL - backed up my entire collection and added a few more to the pile.
 

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
No, they meant that simply will continue adding more games to PS Now, so it's catalog would go well beyond 1000 games. But now in addition to PS2, PS3 and PS4 games, it also would have PS1, PSP and PS5 games too. Now PS Now would also include the game trials and would be bundled with PS Plus (and PS Collection). Pretty different than Nintendo.
Can you buy individual PS1 or PSP games, and download them to your console or play them offline? No? Do you have to keep your subscription active to play them? Sounds like Nintendo Online to me then.
 
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EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
Gamers were led to believe backwards compatible systems would be here, there’s too many articles at the moment and no action.
 

mitch1971

Member
As it stands I pay 100 pounds a year forpsplus and now. But according to grubby, cloud streaming is only included in the premium tier, $16. So for me to get psplus, monthly games, and psnow, (streaming and DL) I will have to pay more to get the same equvilent with the new scheme?

Doesn't make sense.
 
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