EA Play is coming to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on November 10th
Earlier this week Microsoft announced the EA Play (previously EA Access) will be joining the Xbox Game Pass (XGP) Ultimate for no extra cost on November 10th allowing access to 88 titles in EA’s library. When this is combined with the fact that you already get access to over 100 games outside of the EA library on both PC and Xbox as well as Xbox live Gold and it shows that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate might just be the best deal in gaming.
EA Play is also going to be joining Xbox Game Pass for PC but XGP PC will be seeing a price increase next week as it reaches general availability but it seems that this was there plan from the beginning as they have also stated that the price won’t suddenly increase it will only increase after your yearly billing cycle is over. This is also happening roughly 2 months before we can expect EA Play to be added to the subscription suggesting it was planned from the day the service launched in beta.
My big question about all of this is how Microsoft is actually making a profit from any of these services any more especially with XGP Ultimate which will continue to cost £10.99 per month as in this they have: Xbox Game Pass for Console which costs £7.99 per month, Xbox Game Pass for PC which currently costs £3.99 per month but as of next week will cost £7.99 per month, Xbox live Gold which costs £6.99 per month, Xbox Game Streaming (Project xCloud) which doesn’t have a separate cost as of yet and they will soon have EA Play as well for PC and Console which would cost £8 per month or £40 per year. To have all of theses services separately would cost £30.97 per month so by purchasing XGP Ultimate you are saving roughly £20 per month which is definitely an outstanding value.
As for EA Play itself the service is just a re-branding of the previous EA Access service that existed and includes most of the same benefits as before including playing brand new games for up to 10 hours before and after release. The only part of the service that is a bit different is the EA Play pro service which is only available on PC and is basically the equivalent of the Origin Access Premier Service that existed before. The service that’s included with XGP for PC and XGP Ultimate is just the basic EA Play subscription not the more expensive EA Play pro as it’s not available on console at the time of writing.
EA Play isn’t coming until November 10th but even without it Xbox Game Pass already has some absolutely incredible games in it’s library and I doubt anyone will be able to get through them all so if you want hundreds of hours of games to play you won’t be disappointed.