Sony Interactive Entertainment has reportedly been working on its own Game Pass-like platform (Project Spartacus) to compete with Microsoft, but which will apparently be of little use in the long run.
In a new RDX podcast earlier today, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter stated that it is too late for Sony to start competing with Game Pass. Microsoft has already taken an “insurmountable lead” in the past few years on that front and its recent acquisitions have just made it all the more difficult for Sony and PlayStation to rebound in about a decade, according to Pachter.
“I think PlaySation is doomed and I think they are going to cease to exist as we know them in about ten years,” said Pachter. “They can’t compete. They have no chance of competing.”
Pachter also stressed that Sony is not just a couple of years behind Microsoft on the Game Pass service, “it’s an insurmountable lead.”
Microsoft recently made headlines by acquiring Activision Blizzard in a landmark deal worth close to $70 billion. Franchises like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Diablo, Overwatch, and more are now all first-party Xbox games, or at least they will be once the acquisition concludes.
Xbox chief Phil Spencer has assured that Microsoft will be bringing “as many Activision Blizzard games” as possible on Xbox Game Pass. That will essentially bring millions of new subscribers for each game, according to Pachter, making it harder for Sony to catch up in terms of subscriber-counts.
Game Pass surpassed 25 million subscribers by January 2022 after launching back in June 2017. Sony is said to be “pretty close to actually launching” its new multi-structured PlayStation Plus as an answer to Game Pass. It will be interesting to see how many years Sony takes to achieve the same number of subscribers.
