Sony’s PS Plus revamp is meant to rival Game Pass but should Xbox be worried?

metro.co.uk:

GameCentral puts Sony’s big PlayStation Plus announcement under the microscope and examines how it stacks up against Xbox Game Pass.

Given that almost everything leaked out months ago, with even Sony themselves hinting at plans for their own Game Pass equivalent, this week’s announcement of the new three-tier PlayStation Plus did not come as much of a surprise.

Sony no doubt wanted it that way, as the biggest hurdle they have is having people accept that the service will not include first party exclusives from day one. That has been rumoured for a long time now, so there should be few who were surprised by the confirmation, which allows Sony to concentrate on what the service does have.

There are three tiers but they’re not nearly as complicated as that sounds. The first one is just PlayStation Plus as it is now, just with a slightly different name. The second tier is the Game Pass equivalent, and the third tier is Game Pass plus PlayStation Now – which now no longer exists as a separate entity.

Not being able to buy PS Now separately is the only thing likely to cause upset with fans and while they’ll be placated for now, since current subscribers get a free upgrade to PS Plus Premium, how they’ll feel afterwards remains to be seen.

Overall though you’d have to say that the revamp is a pretty compelling offering. If you don’t care about Game Pass and streaming then essentially nothing has changed and you don’t have to do anything. However, if you are a PlayStation owner that’s been feeling jealous about Game Pass, PlayStation Plus Extra does seem to offer a similar experience – although there are a lot of details yet to be explained.

Apart from the lack of day one games the other hurdle for PS Extra is that it’s more expensive