PlayStation's Game Pass Rival Could Change Everything
Xbox Game Pass changed console gaming forever. It used to be a competitive landscape ruled by exclusives, full-priced experiences that dropped a few times a year while dictating the worth of each respective platform. For years this was normality, rival companies labelled as combatants in a ‘console war’ that still feels utterly infantile. Now, there is no war - Xbox have stopped fighting and invented a new way to beat Sony.
No matter how you slice it, this was a competition that Xbox continually lost. With the exception of Halo, Forza Motorsport, Fable, and a handful of other major titles, Microsoft’s gaming machine has rarely measured up to Sony’s offerings on PlayStation. Things are looking up now with the acquisitions of Bethesda, Ninja Theory, Obsidian Entertainment, and countless other studios, but the advent of Game Pass makes this willingness to compete almost irrelevant. [Editor’s Note: this piece was written ahead of the Activision Blizzard acquisition. Yes, we feel quite silly that we didn’t also publish it ahead of the acquisition]. Xbox isn’t in it to win it anymore, accepting that games deserve to be played regardless of the platform they inhabit.
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For a number of years now, all the company’s blockbusters have launched for ‘free’ on Xbox Game Pass. All you need is an active membership to download them upon release, a level of monetary value that still feels surreal in its execution. Games like Halo Infinite or Forza Horizon 5 would happily sell for $70 on PS5, but here Microsoft is offering them for pennies because it understands the importance of growing a service-based ecosystem that no longer relies on million sellers to stay afloat.
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