Sony’s Big PlayStation Streaming Play
The rumormongers have done it again, this time by getting the details of Sony’s new video game streaming service down to a tee before they could be confirmed. The rumors specified how Sony planned to merge the PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now services to create one singular, ultimate service that provided the combined features of both and more for PlayStation console users. It, they said, would be their way of competing with the rise of other video game streaming services like Google’s Stadia, Netflix Games, Amazon’s Luna, and especially Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass. Sony confirmed it was true, all of it, as Drew mentioned.
It’s just a shame they didn’t go through with actually calling it “Spartacus,” its reported codename behind the scenes. It would have been one of the goofiest names in video gaming in recent memory, sure, but it would have been eye-catching and memorable. It’s sometimes worth taking the sacrifice.
Sony is instead giving the three newly-introduced tiers different and boring PlayStation Plus names, though all of them are named in a way that will prevent them from making subscribers feel like they’re getting a raw deal. The PlayStation Plus Essential tier is a renamed iteration of the previously-available service that costs $59.99 a year, which offers a small number of games for free download each month, saving games to the cloud, additional discounts for certain games, and online multiplayer. It’s the lowest tier, but nonetheless “Essential” because, well, how the hell else are you going to play games online? The new PlayStation Plus Extra tier will give players an additional library of up to 400 PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 games, in addition to the above-mentioned already-available PS Plus features, for the heftier price of $99.99 a year.
The largest, and therefore most attractive, tier is the PlayStation Plus Premium one, which will provide a library of PlayStation 3, PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, and eventually PSP games for streaming. Certain PSOne, PS2, and PSP games will also be available for download. Sure, this will require for players to pony up an even heftier $119.99 a year for the service, but it will finally make the rumors that said games from all PlayStation generations would be playable on PlayStation 5 true. (They’ll be playable on PS4 too.) “All” in this case peculiarly won’t include Vita titles, but I would like to think their arrival is inevitable.
There’s a notable distinction between this and Xbox Game Pass. The newest games that will be available as part of the new PlayStation Plus service will be recent titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Returnal, Death Stranding (presumably the Director’s Cut?), God of War, and Mortal Kombat 11. But these aren’t brand-new titles. One key aspect that’s made XGP so attractive is how newly-released games have debuted on the service on launch day, particularly Microsoft-published titles like Halo Infinite and Crackdown 3. Sony isn’t ready to commit to that yet.
PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan mentioned that putting new games on the service on day-one or close to that is “not a road that [they’re] going to go down with this new service.” He continued by saying that [they] feel if [they] were to do that with the games that [they] make at PlayStation Studios, that virtuous cycle will be broken. The level of investment that [they] need to make in [their] studios would not be possible, and [they] think the knock-on effect on the quality of the games that [they] make would not be something that gamers want.” It’s a very long way of saying they prefer for their games to sell for potential profits in an old-fashioned way, though physical and digital channels launching at $49.99 or more. Most third-party publishers aren’t willing to do this with most of their new AAA games either; Microsoft is simply braver in this regard.
There’s a chance it won’t stay that way, though. “The way the world is changing so very quickly at the moment, nothing is forever,” Ryan said. If there comes a time when it’s more lucrative for Sony to put their day-one games on the service, they will. It could particularly help with giving online multiplayer titles larger player bases right out the gate, as it did for Halo Infinite. It will similarly help if those titles have plenty of in-game microtransactions, a staple of nearly every big multiplayer game these days, to mitigate any risk of it being on a subscription service. Considering Sony’s future games-as-service desires, those would be the first such titles to greet the service.
Services like these will perhaps be the only way publishers and hardware manufacturers are willing to preserve games in the future. It won’t be the most ideal solution considering how players will be at the whim of the service, with game downloads likely to mimic other PlayStation Plus titles in how the software will only work while subscribed to the service. But that will nonetheless be a better alternative compared to streaming some of them.
The overall debut of this updated service is another reminder that digital game streaming and game subscription packages are here to stay. There will be no denying how solid a deal these will be for platform owners who want to try out a bunch of games while not paying for all of them individually, but it could soon raise questions regarding whether we’ll have the option to own most games in the future. At least we have a choice… for now.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
