PlayStation Now Is Ushering in a New Era
Forget the console wars — the real battle for gaming supremacy is just heating up and Sony took a big step in the right direction today.
Sony has had a pretty busy Christmas Eve. While the big news is that you can now watch The Interview on Google’s services and Xbox they also announced that their streaming service, PlayStation Now will be available on upcoming Samsung Smart TVs. PlayStation Now is Sony’s game streaming service that streams PlayStation 3 titles to all of Sony’s current PlayStation consoles and Bravia televisions. In short, it’s Netflix for games.
What makes today’s news so important is Sony is taking this seriously. They know that if they don’t get started on creating the service and make it high quality then another company could beat them to the punch. As Sony manage to ramp up the service and infrastructure, it will likely be quite a force. After the service exits out of its current beta stage and matures it could even be a game changer like Netflix was. Netflix’s streaming services started off fairly light on content and on devices that could use it. Initially it launched on Xbox 360 and Roku boxes in 2008 then gradually proliferated to other devices. It quickly had more content to choose from, becoming a force that has caused traiditional means of media consumption to be re-examined. If Sony were to follow this model, releasing a PlayStation Now app on Vizio and LG televisions, PCs, and even mobile devices, people would be hard pressed not to go out and buy a PS3 controller and start using the service.
The service itself is using a rental model for now but going forward, Sony has teased a subscription based model. You save your games on the cloud and it has all of the same advantages that PlayStation 3 titles have with trophies and the PlayStation Network. All it takes is a PlayStation controller, at least a 5Mbps connection to play the game and your in business.
What’s more surprising is Microsoft has been slow to respond. There have been various rumors over the years that Microsoft is working on its own Xbox streaming service. Such a service could actually be part of Microsoft’s overall consumer strategy for Windows 10, as the company plans to unveil more plans about how Windows 10 will impact all of Microsoft’s services and devices next month.
Microsoft will likely follow a similar strategy that Sony is following by slowly rolling out such a service, first across their own devices and then onto others such as television sets and maybe even devices such as iOS and Android devices. You can get Office on pretty much any device now in some form or another afterall.
This is the beginning of a new kind of war; a war where everyone wins. While currently in order to play the next Halo you have to buy an Xbox One console and in order to play the next Uncharted title you will have to buy a PlayStation 4 in a few short years this could mean we could all be playing these titles under one device, just as we have our choice of which music and video streaming services we use on our phones and smart television sets right now.
Death of the Console?
The death of the console has been predicted for quite sometime. As broadband speeds get better it’s only logicial that consoles, like CDs and DVDs have will become less important but will still remain an option. There is always an audience for physical media, but as long as the experience with local media and cloud media become indistinguishable, people buying one box for gaming will become a minority.
Cheers to Sony for taking a big step in the right direction. Hopefully Microsoft has a response soon and heck maybe even Nintendo and Valve’s Steam. I look forward to the day where I can play The Last of Us and Halo all from my computer simply by opening up an app and turning on my wireless controller.
