Xbox says PlayStation’s ‘Game Pass’ rival is inevitable, but won’t gloat

The head of Xbox believes the rumoured arrival of a PS5 equivalent to the subscription Game Pass platform is “the right answer” for Sony.

In an interview with IGN, Xbox chief Phil Spencer called the incoming rival – believed to be an enhanced combo of the existing PS Plus and PlayStation Now services – “an inevitability.”

Spencer also said he felt Sony’s decision is to bring certain franchises to PC “makes sense” overall. So, it seems that, rather than being threatened by an incoming PlayStation feature that could even the playing playing field.

He says: “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.

“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 says that if PlayStation does follow through with the Game Pass rival, he won’t see it as a bragging point for Microsoft’s bold decision to go forth and shift the paradigm for the way we consume games.

“I don’t really look at it as validation,” he added. “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.”

“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.”