Brotaku

A new report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has claimed that Sony Interactive Entertainment is working on a new subscription service, codenamed “Spartacus”, to compete with Xbox Game Pass. The subscription service will reportedly have three tiers and will keep the PlayStation Plus name as Sony Interactive Entertainment want to phase away from the PlayStation Now name. The report also claims that the service won’t offer first-party titles at launch like Game Pass and that the service will launch in the Spring of 2022. The report also mentions that Sony will be expanding its efforts in cloud-based gaming.

Here are what the reported tiers will get you:

• Tier 1: PlayStation Plus
• Tier 2: PlayStation Plus and access to a catalogue of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 games.
• Tier 3: PlayStation Plus, access to a catalogue of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 games and access to a collection of classic games from the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable.

It’s unclear as to whether the service will let you access the classic library natively on your console or through streaming only, as is the case with PlayStation Now. Based on what little information we do have this seems to be a basic merger of PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now. Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, previously stated that there’s news to come from Sony about a competitor to Game Pass. Sony has also been rumored to be working on a subscription service that would offer anime and video game content following the acquisition of Crunchyroll.