Game Pass Vs. The New PS Plus, The Comparison We Had To Make - Kotaku

Now, it looks a whole lot like Microsoft’s Game Pass: For roughly the same amount of money, both offer access to a Netflix-style games-on-demand library.

Premium is $18 a month, or $120 a year, and adds access to classic games, game trials, and cloud streaming for most of the games in the library.

Microsoft says “more than 100” games are currently streamable via cloud gaming on Xbox Game Pass, but more games are added every few weeks.

Right now, the Game Pass library currently lists 381 games as capable of streaming.

Right now, the Xbox Game Pass library has about 475 games, but that tally comprises the library across both tiers, including the 92 games currently part of EA Play.

Third-party games tend to stick around for a year at most, though some, like Rockstar’s open-world Hold ‘Em simulator Red Dead Redemption 2, become unavailable after a matter of months.

This year alone, the twee Zelda-like Tunic, the snowboarding sim Shredders, and the puzzler-cum-dungeon-crawler Loot River all launched on Game Pass.

(Here’s Kotaku’s list of the best under-the-radar games currently available.) Developers have acknowledged to Kotaku that debuting on Game Pass cuts into initial sales but is ultimately worth it for the tradeoff in publicity.

PS Plus Extra currently includes around 430 PS4 and PS5 games, while Premium adds another 395 from PS1, PS2, PS3 (streaming only), and PSP.

Ari: Going into this exercise, I totally imagined it’d paint a clear picture of Game Pass superiority, but these two services seem fundamentally identical to me—right down to the UI—with Sony’s new version of PS Plus marginally better in the few aspects that matter.

The prices are mostly the same, but the option to pay for a year of PS Plus at a “discount” edges out Game Pass in that regard.

Sure, Game Pass’ big draw is that it puts Microsoft’s first-party games on the service at launch, but…Microsoft barely has any first-party games out this year.