According to a recent Bloomberg report, Sony is currently working on a competitor to Xbox Game Pass – which is codenamed Project Spartacus. It was reportedly planned for a Spring 2022 release, and while official details on the matter remain non-existent at this point, renowned industry insider Jeff Grubb seems to have additional details about the service.
Speaking via Grubbsnax, Grubb talked about how the service is pretty close to launching, and development of the service seems to be coming along well, according to his sources.
“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,” he said (transcribed by VGC).
Grubb also claimed to have additional information on Spartacus’ 3 tiered-access, and their pricing models.
“Right now they are called ‘essential’, ‘extra’ and ‘premium’. 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.”
The lowest tier is supposedly called “Essential” which is standard PS Plus and will cost $10/month.
“Essential is PS Plus with the monthly games, just like you know it today,” he claims.
The second tier, “Extra” will add in downloadable PS Now games (numbering in the hundreds) along with the perks of the “Essential” tier for an asking price of $13/month.
“For the extra tier, you get a ‘downloadable game catalogue’ anything on PSNow that was downloadable, seems like it would be in here. 250, 300 games, something like that. You don’t get cloud streaming, but you do get 300 games you can download,” he added.
The final tier will combine all these perks along with full game trials of PlayStation’s first-party games, classic games, and cloud streaming via PS Now for an asking price of $16/month.
“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. You also get classic games and streaming, none of the other tiers will have cloud streaming, you also get classic games. 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.”
Grubb’s findings seem to align well with what the original Bloomberg report suggested. However, without any official confirmation of the service’s existence from Sony themselves, it’s best that fans take all of this information with a grain of salt for now.