With Death Stranding, a game has landed in Game Pass that started as a Playstation exclusive title. Sony couldn’t prevent it.
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Death Stranding is available today in Game Pass on PC.
© Shutterstock.com/Miguel Lagoa
Surprisingly for many, Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding is available today in PC Game Pass. The mix of mystery, action and walking simulator with a bizarre story and Norman Reedus in the leading role was well received by players, but was only available on Playstation 4 for a long time. The game was released for Playstation in November 2019, the Director’s Cut followed for PC in summer 2020 and for Playstation 5 in July 2021.
Starting today, PC gamers can play Death Stranding for free with a PC Game Pass subscription. But how can a Sony exclusive title end up in Microsoft’s gaming service?
Distribution rights with Italian developer studio
The reason for this is very simple: the distribution rights for Death Stranding do not lie with Sony Entertainment Interactive, but with the Italian developer studio 505 Games. This was also responsible for the fact that Death Stranding was ported to the PC at all. The studio has now negotiated what is likely to be a lucrative deal with Microsoft to bring the game to Game Pass.
There is still little reason to hope that Death Stranding will also be available on Xbox consoles at some point. Even though Sony doesn’t own the distribution rights to the game, the Japanese will certainly have secured themselves to prevent an Xbox release.
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