What is PlayStation Now? Why is it significant?I’ll do my best to answer some of these questions
On July 2012, Sony made some late night breaking news when it acquired Gaikai, the cloud based streaming service, for 380 million dollars. 380 million dollars is a lot of money. And for a company like Sony that was bleeding money at an astonishing rate (they’ve stabilized a little bit since then) this was a daring move. This was an investment in which Sony had a vision of the future.
After not hearing much about Gaikai for the last year and a half; at CES 2014 we finally got a glimpse of the future of gaming, a game changer called PlayStation Now.
There are a lot of questions you may be asking yourself. What is PlayStation Now? Why is it significant? How will it work? Among others I’m sure. So, I’ll do my best to answer some of these questions.
PlayStation Now is basically Gaikai. A cloud based service with the potential to stream, basically, any game that came to the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, and the original PlayStation. Think of it like Netflix. You launch PlayStation Now and you have all these games from the past to choose from. When PlayStation Now does launch, it will be just a limited amount of games; games that Sony currently owns. The four games that Sony showed off at CES were The Last of Us, Beyond: Two Souls, God of War: Ascension and Puppeteer.
Look for first party games like that to launch with PlayStation Now. I believe when PlayStation Now does roll out you’ll have the opportunity to play the Uncharted series, the God of War series, the Sly Cooper series, and on and on.
Eventually, the potential is third party studios will join the party as well, and then games that came from the PlayStation 2 era, and the original PlayStation era will be available. That probably isn’t for awhile, but that’s the exciting thing about PlayStation Now is that you can do that eventually. It’s mind blowing to think you can play, for example, Resident Evil 2 on your PlayStation 4, on your Vita, on your TV, on your Smart Phone and Tablet.
Yes, that’s right, PlayStation Now will be expanding to other devices after the initial launch on the PS4, PS3, PS Vita, and 2014 Sony Bravia TV’s.
Think of these two scenarios. Scenario 1: Start up The Last of Us on your console, save it. Pick it back up when your out of the house and, with wifi, on your PlayStation Vita, save it there. And then go to a friend’s house that has a 2014 Sony Bravia TV and pick it back up from there. That’s what you can expect to do when PlayStation Now initially launches.
Now, scenario 2 is you can start up Final Fantasy VII, Twisted Metal, Resident Evil 2, whatever classic game you want to put in there, fire that up on the PlayStation 4, save it, and continue it on your smart phone or your tablet. That’s the full potential of PlayStation Now.
PlayStation Now will also feature trophies, which you’d expect for games that had trophies, but to really take it to the next level I hope trophies are implemented are in the older, classic games. I would love to replay Resident Evil 1, 2, 3, etc. and earn trophies and earn a Platinum trophy at the end of it. To me, that would make it an absolute must have. We’ll see, there was a patent that circulated around in which gave Sony the power to implement trophies to older games, which you can see here. That would be the bees’ knees for me.
Here you can see the devices PlayStation now will be available on
Also, PlayStation Now will support multiplayer. You’ll be able to launch PlayStation Now and play against another player(s) playing the game using a disc. Perhaps, this will the start of a cross platform system. For example, one may play The Last of Us via PlayStation Now on the PlayStation 4, another is playing through a PlayStation Vita, and another player is playing the disc version of The Last of Us on the PlayStation 3. I don’t know, that’s something to consider, something that may happen and be announced sometime down the line.
Games will stream at a 720p resolution and a 5Mbps broadband connection is recommend for a low latency.
That’s about all we know for sure, sprinkled in with some guesses on my part. As for a release date, we don’t have a concrete release date yet, but we do know that PlayStation Now will launch in North America sometime in Summer of this year, 2014.
With an ambitious project like this there are bound to be a lot of problems when it finally does launch. As we’ve seen numerous times over the past few years launches that include Diablo III, Sim City, Grand Theft Auto V Online, and heck, you can even go outside the world of games and include the Universal Health Care Act (AKA: ObamaCare). Launches to these massive events don’t go so well.
Eventually they do finally work themselves out (well, at the time of this post, the Health Care website is still struggling) and that’s what I would expect from PlayStation Now when it does launch. Expect a very rocky beginning from PlayStation Now. To combat this issue before it launches, Sony will be beta testing it. If you go to this website, you can sign up and maybe get picked to be a beta tester.
Now, what will this cost? Answer: we don’t know yet. Sony hasn’t announced that yet. Just speculating I would think there will be a few different tiers; a few different options in regards to pricing.
For example, I would expect this to cost somewhere in the ballpark of 150 dollars for 12 months. When you break it down that’s 12.50 a month. Or, if you’re signed up for PlayStation Plus, I could see PlayStation Now being discounted to 9.99 a month and a total of around 120 dollars for 12 months.
Again, these aren’t official, this is just me guessing and brainstorming. This could be way more than what I’m expecting or way less than what I’m expecting (I highly doubt this though.). Personally, I wouldn’t expect this service to cost less than 9.99/12.99 a month, but again, this is just to give you an idea of what may happen in terms of cost. I wouldn’t be surprised though if it’s way more than this. Maybe somewhere in the ballpark of 20.00 dollars a month, 25 dollars a month. I don’t know, something to keep in mind. We’ll just have to wait and see when Sony does announce just exactly how much PlayStation Now will cost.
Well, alright, this is just about everything you need to know and what to expect from PlayStation Now. As you can see, there is reason to be excited about PlayStation Now. If done right this has the potential to be a real game changer. But, I open it up to you.
What do you think? Are you excited for PlayStation Now? Are you pessimistic about this streaming service? Whatever the case maybe leave your comments below.
