The most exciting news to come out of the MLB The Show 22 announcements today has to either be the Nintendo Switch announcement or the fact that MLB The Show 22 will be on Game Pass day one yet again. (We would count the alleged leak that includes a famous former player who wears the number two as the most exciting announcement, but that’s not official or confirmed.)
MLB The Show 22 On Game Pass Day One
MLB The Show just being on Xbox consoles last year was a huge deal, and it was only made more important once it was on Game Pass day one. It has remained on Game Pass all year, so we should expect the same for MLB The Show 22. We should also probably assume at this point that Microsoft made Game Pass part of the deal of luring MLB into going cross platform in the first place. There is no question Major League Baseball gets into far more homes this way, and it does not seem to be hurting The Show brand in sales since it was still the 9th best selling game in 2021, according to NPD. In fact, MLB The Show 21 was the best-selling version of all-time even with it going to Game Pass. In other words, there was not much downside here for SDS or MLB to this point.
Some people have varying views on how the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions performed against each other. Some thought the latency was better on Xbox while others thought pitching inputs were better on PS5. I can’t say I played enough on both consoles (I still don’t have an Xbox Series X) to have an opinion, but some of this likely comes down to the TV/monitor you use.
Either way, the hope is this time around the consoles more or less will be the same from a performance standpoint, and perhaps even SDS starts to get cute and give us more performance options on both consoles so we can toy around more with 30/60/120 frames per second options at different resolutions.
Bottom Line
I do think there’s a real reason now to start considering when MLB The Show starts being considered more as an Xbox property. As the install bases of both consoles grows, you’ll always still have cross-platform play so it’s somewhat moot what console you choose. Still, the idea of now just using Game Pass and then perhaps buying the Nintendo Switch version for the portable experience does start to come into play for me.
Again, I don’t think it really matters right now because SDS is not really losing anything since people are playing the game either way. However, it will be interesting to see if the strong retail/digital sales continue this year, or we now see more people start flocking to Game Pass and passing up on buying a “full price” version of MLB The Show. SDS is still a PlayStation studio as well, so it will be interesting to monitor whether this matters to Sony at all at some point as well.
