Recent developments might possibly suggesting that there could be some movement on that front. As reported by IGN Italy, some NeoGAF users have recently reported that their PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now subscriptions seem to have been merged. More specifically, users with active subscriptions for both services are reporting that both are appearing as subscriptions for PS Plus, rather than one active subscription for each. Meanwhile, another user also reports that upon renewing their PlayStation Plus account, they received a PS Now subscription as a gift for the same duration.

It is, of course, entirely feasible that this is a glitch on PlayStation’s end, but recent leaks would suggest otherwise. More recently, for instance, reports claimed that Project Spartacus is “pretty close” to launching. Other leaks, meanwhile, have claimed that a big PlayStation event is scheduled for March (where Hogwarts Legacy will also allegedly re-emerge and a Forspoken delay could be announced)- which, if accurate, might be the place where such a subscription service could get unveiled.

We’ll keep an eye out for more details, so stay tuned for any and all updates.

One person who thinks that that’s a good idea is, interestingly enough, Xbox boss Phil Spencer. Speaking recently to IGN, when asked about the aforementioned rumour, Spencer said that initiative such as subscription services (among other things) are “the right answer.”

“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,” Spencer said. “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.”

Spencer went on to add that he personally views subscription services as “an inevitability”, and that he eventually expects Xbox’s competitors to adopt that approach as well.

“When I’m talking to our teams, I talk about it as an inevitability,” he said. “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.

“I like it because it feeds our energy on what are the next things that we should be working on as we continue to build out the things that we’ve done in the past. Because I think the right answer is to ship great games, ship them on PC, ship them on console, ship them on cloud, make them available Day 1 in the subscription. And I expect that’s what our competitor will do.”

Interestingly, a couple of months before the PS5’s launch, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan said that a model similar to Xbox Game Pass would not be sustainable for PlayStation’s approach to game development, where most new releases are AAA projects with massive budgets. Not long afterward though, when asked if Sony was going to come out with a Game Pass competitor, Ryan said there was “news to come” on that front.

As per a report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Sony is working on a rival subscription service currently codenamed “Spartacus”. Set to launch in Spring 2022 for both PS4 and PS5, the service will allegedly combine the PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now subscription services (with branding for the former being retained), and also add backward compatibility to the mix.

For a monthly fee, the service is said to offer benefits to subscribers across three tiers, though plans have not yet been finalized, according to the report. The first tier will feature all the PlayStation Plus benefits, while the second tier will feature a “large” selection of PS4 games, with PS4 games being added to the mix later. Finally, the third tier will offer game streaming similar to PlayStation Now, extended demos for games, and a library of legacy games from the PS1, PS2, PS3, and PSP.

There’s no word yet on whether the games in any of these tiers will be cloud-exclusive or native downloads similar to Xbox Game Pass, or if Sony has any plans for also adding day one releases the way Microsoft does consistently to its own service.

In November 2020, when asked if Sony will have a subscription service to offer players similar to Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan said that they would have something to announce in the future. Earlier this year, it was also reported that Sony was working on an Xbox Game Pass “counterpunch”.

That said, Sony has also previously said that the Game Pass model wouldn’t work for the kind of games it makes and the general strategy it adopts when it comes to game development. Whether their thinking has changed or if they’re planning on offering a different kind of subscription service remains to be seen- but if Spring 2022 is indeed when this service, currently called Spartacus, will launch, then we should be hearing something official about it not long from now.