Playstation Now, Maybe Later
An honest review of Playstation’s cloud gaming service.
The Netflix styled gaming service offered by Sony, which only streams Playstation 3 titles at the moment, shows promise in the long term, but kind of sucks right now.
Personally I’m very enthusiastic about cloud gaming — the idea of streaming games online sounds amazing; hardware upgrades would be less frequent, if at all, but the best part of cloud gaming is that it could be on par with pc gaming. This is the long term promise of such technologies and it’s exciting!
The Good
The library is pretty big, but not too big — there was always a game to discover and play. The selection of games ranged from The Last of Us to Pac-man and they keep adding more.
The Bad
The price for the service is $19.99 (USD) per month, which is pretty steep if you compare it to other steaming services: Netflix, $9.99; Spotify, $9.99; Apple Music, $9.99. I’m sure by now you’ve seen a common theme amongst these subscription streaming services. Arguably, yes it’s gaming, but these are all forms of entertainment.
The Ugly
The graphics in Saints Row 4 suffered the most graphically and performance wise — it was running on ultra low pc graphics.
The lag was incredibly annoying especially on games like The Last of Us — a game that’s already suspenseful.
Conclusion
For me, I know it’s exciting to think about the future of cloud gaming, but others remain skeptical. Although graphics are not the most important thing to all gamers, the occasional lag may deter some away from PS Now. But with the shortcomings of PS Now, I understand why one would have that perspective. However to the skeptics out there I say, Playstation Now? Na, maybe later.
