‘There will be a response to Game Pass’ for PS5 claims God Of War creator

With 18 million people subscribed to Xbox Game Pass, it’s surprising, to say the least, that Sony has yet to provide its own alternative. While it does have PlayStation Now, that’s never been anywhere near as popular as Microsoft’s offering.

However, Sony may be working on its own version of Game Pass, at least according to David Jaffe – the man credited with creating the God Of War and Twisted Metal franchises.

While Jaffe is no longer working at Sony, having left in 2007 to found his own studio Eat Sleep Play (which he also later resigned from in 2012), he claims to have heard from his own sources that the company is making what he calls a ‘counterpunch’ to Xbox Game Pass.

‘I’ve said time and again that people who are writing [PlayStation CEO] Jim Ryan’s obituary are way premature,’ he said in his most recent YouTube video, where he was initially discussing the supposed Hideo Kojima/Xbox collaboration (starting at 1:05:45).

‘We had the guy on the show yesterday that had made the petition to fire Jim Ryan and I was like, ‘Dude, that’s way premature,’ because Jim Ryan doesn’t owe anybody, Sony doesn’t owe anybody, the truth about what’s coming and what their counterpunch to Game Pass is’, he said, as transcribed by VGC.

‘What I can tell you is I know they are doing some stuff because I know people at Sony who have told me that they are doing some stuff. There will be a response to Game Pass.’

The idea of a PlayStation Game Pass is certainly a popular one, but beyond the question of whether Jaffe is a reliable source of information there’s also the question of why Sony didn’t create an equivalent long before now, given Game Pass has been around since 2017 and requires no technical innovation.

Sony may have already started creating its own service though, with Jim Ryan appearing to hint at the possibility last year during an interview with Russian outlet TASS.

‘There is actually news to come, but just not today,’ he said when asked how Sony would respond to Game Pass, ‘We have PlayStation Now which is our subscription service, and that is available in a number of markets.’

Should Sony start a PlayStation Game Pass, the next question is whether it would be merged with PlayStation Now or replace it altogether, since it’s unlikely that Sony would run both alongside each other. Having to pay up for two separate subscription services wouldn’t exactly be appealing for PlayStation owners.

PlayStation Now does offer a large library of games across the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 2, but Sony rarely adds brand new titles to the service from day one. Plus, it doesn’t feature any games from the original PlayStation.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has added new games to Game Pass on the same day they launch, such as Outriders, and has also entered a deal with EA to include its own EA Play service, thus filling out its library even more.