Xbox boss Phil Spencer says PlayStation’s Xbox Game Pass competitor is “an inevitability"

In an interview with IGN, the newly crowned CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer, has reacted to the rumours of PlayStation’s Xbox Game Pass competitor known as “Spartacus.”

“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,” Spencer told IGN in the interview. “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.”

While Microsoft definitely has bragging rights for being ahead of the curve with Xbox Game Pass, Spencer revealed that “I don’t really look at it as validation,” now that Sony is reportedly looking to emulate that winning formula. 

“I actually, when I’m talking to our teams, I talk about it as an inevitability,” Spencer continued, explaining that he sees this potential move from Sony as just proof of the industry’s future, rather than Microsoft’s smart decision making. 

Xbox Game Pass may already be plenty successful with 25 million users, but Spencer revealed that they won’t be slowing down, as Xbox “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.”

Sony has yet to officially announce their Xbox Game Pass competitor “Spartacus”, however with a release loosely penned for Spring, we may be seeing an announcement fairly soon, likely during a State of Play presentation. 

According to a Bloomberg report from last year, the revamped PlayStation Plus service will be available in three tiers. The first tier will reportedly be equivalent to existing PlayStation Plus offerings, while the second tier gives users access to a catalogue of PlayStation 4 and PS5 games to download and play. 

The third tier will also give PlayStation players access to a library of PlayStation 1, 2, 3, and PSP games, as well as all the features of PlayStation Now, Sony’s game streaming service.