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After a couple of months of rumors and a few days of reports that the news was coming, PlayStation has finally revealed the details surrounding its new tiered subscription service. As expected, the service will combine PS Plus and PS Now, effectively retiring the latter. There will be three tiers – Essential, Extra, and Premium – each of which will include various games and perks. Extra and Premium will include a pretty big library of titles, some of which have already been revealed.
Games like Marvel's Spider-Man and Returnal will be available to those opting for anything more than Essential, as well as games from all major publishers. That's according to Jim Ryan who sat down with Gamesindustry.biz and said exactly that. The PlayStation boss says all major publishers will be present on the service, and conversations are ongoing and going well.
That's a very interesting claim to make considering how the industry has changed in the last few months alone. The biggest question mark hanging over Ryan's claim right now pertains to games published by Activision Blizzard. Microsoft bought the company for almost $70 billion earlier this year, something that got PlayStation owners' knickers in a bit of a twist as it might mean games like Call Of Duty become Xbox exclusives in the coming years.
Xbox and Activision have assured fans of the studio's many IPs that won't happen, at least not for a little while. Xbox boss Phil Spencer has even discussed his desire to keep Activision games on PlayStation. Ryan makes no mention of them by name when discussing PlayStation's new tiered service, but claiming all major publishers are on board is a promising sign that there really have been lengthy discussions between all parties involved.
While they aren't at war like some owners of their respective consoles appear to be, it can't be ignored that PlayStation and Xbox are still competitors. While the omission of big launches on day one from the new PS Plus system means it won't compare to Game Pass in one very major way, it is still a lot closer to the service than anything PlayStation has offered up before. Xbox won't want everything people come to Game Pass for available on PS Plus either.