Sony started to to this back in 2010 with the release of PS Plus. As I remember it also did have time limited game trials, PS1 and PSP games back then btw.
Later they released a game subscription with a catalog of hundreds of games, before MS did it. And cloud gaming service targeting first console but also other devices announcing day one that down the road it would reach mobile and PC too, also before MS did it.
Eh, Sony
kind of started a ball rolling that now MS is riding on top of, either to jump the canyon and claim the great beyond or to fall into the abyss and drag down everybody with it (hyperbolic, I know,) but PS Plus wasn't
really the same thing as Game Pass until Game Pass pushed harder.
I don't really remember all of the steps of Xbox Live to Xbox Gold to Xbox Game Pass to Xbox Whatnot, but PS Plus started as just sort of a gift program; they used to have free online, but when they started charging for it like Xbox did, people were angry, but Sony made them happy by giving them two games a month. Not the best games, not the newest games, not the Sony games that many people bought PlayStations for, but "free" is free, even if you're paying $10 a month for freebies and/or online play. And the games actually got better over time; at first, it was last year's basketball game and maybe a pretty decent Codemasters title that not enough people played, but something nice to have if you didn't already own them. Eventually though, there were some pretty good months mixed in with the bad months. And then Vita came out, and for a while it was 3 games a month (and RIP Vita, but for a little while they substituted PSVR games as the third game when Vita lost its life.) If you had been diligently adding every PS Plus game to your library every month since 2010,
you would have had a library of over 700 games by now! But if you were to sign up for regular old PS Plus any time up until last June (I think things changed with PS Essentials?), you wouldn't get 700 games, you would just get that month's 2 games. Sure, there's tiers where you can pay more to get more "free", but you've still got to go out and pay for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart or Horizon Forbidden West or TLoU1 if you want to play those big games.
(*I'm probably forgetting parts of how PS Plus worked, let me know where I messed up?)
Xbox Game Pass is a different monster. It was a declaration that you would get everything, e.v.e.r.y.thing, always, from the Xbox internal studio library, by buying into their subscription service. And
then, they paid $75 billion dollars to acquire two more studios (make that studios-of-studios; publishers actually, but the publishing side of both companies are in question as the parent companies get absorbed,) and bring all of those games to the Game Pass library. Plus they had already started signing on other publishers (whose titles dropped in and out of the service, but still, there was some big libraries included; PS+ also has versions of some of these deals too,) and also hooking up indies to have those games also on Game Pass.
To the point now that, if you're still buying Xbox games to play on your Xbox... why?? What games are you still buying that aren't on Game Pass? How much gaming do you need when you've already got so much stuff on Game Pass available for "free"? What doesn't Game Pass give you? (It's facetious question, of course not everything is on Game Pass... but man, it can really feel that way sometimes.)
That's the difference. PS Plus was always a nice little supplement in addition to the great games you happily buy individually to amass your collection, whereas Xbox Game Pass is selling itself as a neverending, all-included smorgasborg that they're just feeding you, and feeding you, and feeding you...
