Last night, the official PC Game Pass The Twitter account made changes to its social media profiles, which caused a lot of buzz and left everyone wondering a little bit about what was going on.
the account, with a message It says “sometimes we just love a good landscape picture #newprofilepic”, which brings you to the new icon – its landscape seems to be reminiscent of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding.
If you click on the image and look outside the Game Pass branding, you’ll see a landscape that looks a lot like the Icelandic-inspired landscape from Kojima’s latest sci-fi epic. For example, the tweet below highlights some of the similarities to the image and what you’ll see in the PlayStation and PC-only game.
But is this really a hint that Death Stranding is coming to Game Pass? This is a tribute to Death Stranding, maybe not some offbeat Starfield promo, or what? Could it be related to Hellblade 2? If so, why did only the PC side of the Game Pass account change its icon?
You might think the idea of Death Stranding — one of Sony’s most famous PlayStation exclusives of the last generation — making it to Game Pass is far-fetched. Why would Sony put the cards directly into the hands of erstwhile rivals, so to speak?But this isn’t the first time this has happened — in fact, we’ve seen two Sony-owned games appear on the Game Pass service in the form of MLB Show 22 and MLB Show 21.
And let’s not forget that the whole deal goes both ways: Bethesda is now owned by Microsoft, and the publisher has given PlayStation two exclusive titles as timed exclusives (at least). Both Deathloop and Tokyo: Ghostwire came to PlayStation after the Bethesda/Microsoft deal was formalized. When it comes to rights between console platforms, nothing is as simple as it seems.
It’s also worth noting that PlayStation no longer sees the PC as the enemy: Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, has been outspoken that the company is making acquisitions with the express goal of bringing more PlayStation games to the PC. Hermen Hulst, head of PlayStation Studios, also said that more PlayStation exclusives will come to PC as the company continues to study the growing multi-platform market.
To complicate matters, it was 505 Games, not Sony, that released the PC version of Death Stranding. This means that there is an outside opportunity to do some other types of deals here. At this point, it’s also worth keeping in mind that another PlayStation-first game – meme-generating Forspoken – will bring Xbox achievements and more when it launches on the Windows Store; it’s not technically an Xbox game, but in the Xbox ecosystem game running in. Does this happen in Death Stranding?
It is impossible to know at this point. Whatever this little update ends up being, it’s going to bring something noteworthy: Either PC Game Pass blinds the entire fanbase, or we’re going to get a big Sony game on the service. A win-win, right?
