Xbox boss says day one PlayStation Game Pass is ‘inevitable’

metro.co.uk:

Xbox boss Phil Spencer certainly believes the rumours of a PlayStation Game Pass, calling Sony’s decision inevitable.

The rumours of Sony creating its own Game Pass equivalent for PlayStation 5 are getting strong by the day, following the removal of PlayStation Now gift cards and the discovery of PlayStation 3 games on the PlayStation 5 store.

Even Xbox boss Phil Spencer thinks it’ll happen eventually, describing a PlayStation Game Pass as ‘inevitable’.

When asked about it by IGN, Spencer says that while he doesn’t necessarily feel validated by Sony’s supposed plans to emulate the Game Pass model, he does believe that it proves Microsoft had the right idea.

‘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,’ said Spencer.

‘I don’t really look at it as validation. I actually, when I’m talking to our teams, I talk about it as an inevitability. 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.’

Although Spencer is right that Game Pass requires no technical solution it does rely heavily on Microsoft’s near infinite cash reserves, which Sony cannot match. PlayStation boss Jim Ryan has alluded to this before, by suggesting that releasing all first party games on day one, like Game Pass ‘for us, just doesn’t