What Is Google Play Pass for Google Play Store?

Remember when you’d use to buy something, and you’d be one and done? You’d pick up Mario Kart 64 for your Nintendo 64, and that’d be it. These days, you’ve got to load on DLC and season passes. And so many of these are on a subscription basis. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that Google Play Pass for the Play Store is apparently moving in the same direction.

You know how you used to buy individual songs and albums off iTunes? These days, it’s much more likely that you subscribe to a monthly service like Spotify. Remember when you used to buy individual DVDs (or rent them from Blockbuster)? Now, you’ve got Netflix. There’s Audible for audiobooks and Kindle Unlimited for ebooks too.

But when you buy mobile apps and games for your smartphone and tablet, you still buy them one at a time. Inside each app, you might find DLC or subscriptions, but the apps themselves are generally a one-off affair with the corresponding app store. But Google Play Pass could change that.

Likely in an effort to bolster revenue for paid apps (since we all love our free apps so much), Google may be introducing something called the Google Play Pass. For a set monthly fee, you’d gain access to several paid apps that you would’ve had to purchase individually.

Based on this description, Google Play Pass would be less like Spotify and more like a monthly loot box. It was a question posed in a recent Google Opinion Rewards survey: “Imagine your app store has a subscription that offers hundreds of dollars worth of paid apps and games for a monthly fee. How well does “Pass” describe this service?”

It feels safe to assume that Google is at least considering and even testing the idea of a monthly subscription for Google Play paid apps and games. Whether or not such a service would ever see the light of day is anyone’s guess, of course, as Google is constantly toying with new ideas. Would you subscribe to such a service?