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Sony is looking to expand PlayStation Plus by introducing new features and by integrating elements from PlayStation Now. Bloomberg originally reported about these efforts — which Sony internally calls “Spartacus” — in December. But now GamesBeat can provide some more info on what these new offerings look like.
Spartacus is an evolution of PlayStation Plus with three tiers. It currently calls those tiers Essential, Extra, and Premium — although those names could change between now and when the service launches. The subscription for these programs is monthly and starts at $10 and goes up to $16. And what do each of those tiers get you? Here’s the current plan:
| Monthly games | Game catalogue | Streaming | Classic games | Game trials | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PS+ Essential | X | $10 | ||||
| PS+ Extra | X | X | $13 | |||
| PS+ Premium | X | X | X | X | X | $16 |
PS+ Essential is the PS+ that you already know. For $10 per month, you get monthly games that you can add to your library. This works a lot like it already works today.
PS+ Extra, meanwhile, gets you the monthly games and a game catalogue for $13 per month. The game catalogue is a library of hundreds of older, downloadable games. This seems like Sony ripped the download catalogue out of PS Now and popped it into PS+ instead.
PS+ Premium gets you all of the above and then everything else for $16 per month. That everything else includes PS Now’s streaming capabilities. You also get a library of “classic games” as well as a new “game trials” feature. Game trials enables you to download and start playing the full versions of new PlayStation games. This likely has a time-limit function, which is similar to how game trials work on the EA Play service from Electronic Arts.
Again, all of these prices and names could change. But this is the general outline of what to expect from Spartacus. And these features should make PS Plus look much stronger in comparison to Xbox Game Pass. While Sony will not include full versions of its blockbuster games in PS Plus on day one, game trials will at least give a bigger audience a chance to sample those games.
Sony is moving into a testing phase for Spartacus in the next few weeks. And it could announce the details of its new membership program in March — although that’ll depend on whether it is ready to roll out the service.
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