When EA announced its new EA Access subscription program for the Xbox One, we were surprised because it sounds like a pretty good deal. Given EA’s past antics, we actually expected the program involved asking gamers to pay an extra $5 per month just for the privilege of playing games on Xbox Live that they’d already purchased. But no — EA Access actually will give you the ability to play games like Madden NFL 15, Battlefield 4 and FIFA 14 even if you’ve never bought the games themselves for just $5 per month or $30 for a full year subscription.
This raises a question, however — why is this awesome-seeming deal only available for Xbox One gamers? GameInformer reached out to Sony to ask why EA Access won’t be coming to the PlayStation 4 and the company essentially said that it didn’t think the offer represented good value for gamers.
“We evaluated the EA Access subscription offering and decided that it does not bring the kind of value PlayStation customers have come to expect,” Sony told GameInformer. “PlayStation Plus memberships are up more than 200% since the launch of PlayStation 4, which shows that gamers are looking for memberships that offer a multitude of services, across various devices, for one low price. We don’t think asking our fans to pay an additional $5 a month for this EA-specific program represents good value to the PlayStation gamer.”
While it’s true that EA Access might not be good value for every customer, it’s definitely good value for customers who buy a lot of EA games, particularly sports games such as FIFA and Madden. If you were already going to lay down $120 combined to buy those two games anyway, why wouldn’t it be good value to just pay a $30 subscription fee for a year so you could play them both online without limits?
At any rate, it doesn’t sound like Sony is too keen on individual publishers offering their own subscriptions so don’t expect it to come to the PS4 anytime soon.
