EA’s subscription service, EA Access, will finally debut on the PlayStation 4 this July.
It’s been a long wait for players of Sony’s console, who have had to sit and watch the service be available for Xbox players for the last five years, and the subscription service has since been made available to PC players as Origin Access. The service will cost either £4/$5 a month or £20/$30 a year, the same as it costs on the Xbox One, and will offer players various perks such as 10 hours of early access to new games, discounts on digital game purchases and downloadable content, and access to a large back catalogue of games through the Vault.
The library of games available through the Vault on the PlayStation 4 is likely to be smaller than its Xbox One counterpart though; the Vault on the Xbox One offers a number of Xbox 360 games to play through backwards compatibility, but the PlayStation 4 doesn’t support backwards compatibility for PS3 games, so expect a lesser number of games to play.
The lack of EA Access on PlayStation 4 was actually a decision made by Sony themselves, who told Game Informer back in 2014 that they didn’t think the subscription service offered value for money for players. Speaking at the time, Sony said:
“We evaluated the EA Access subscription offering and decided that it does not bring the kind of value PlayStation customers have come to expect. 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.”
It’s a bit of a U-turn from Sony who have presumably seen the success of the service on Xbox—as well as the rise of various other subscription services over the last few years—and decided that allowing this kind of service on their platform is important going forward, as more and more gamers are choosing this kind of method for accessing games.
EA Access will launch on PS4 in July.
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