RE: Playstation Now Prices are INSANE

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If you are unaware of what is going on with this subject, feel free to look up a few articles. I am not explaining it because it will just make me angrier. I'll summarize by saying that people are OUTRAGED that the renting application PS Now is going to have some "unfavorable" prices, compared to what gamers can pay for games right now.

What people are forgetting, is that this service enables someone without a Playstation to enjoy Playstation games. There are some people out there that are actually thankful this exists, and then there's everyone on /r/PS4, whos's a selfish demanding :bou::bou::bou::bou:. But to be completely fair to these simple minded children, Sony allowed this to happen. They allowed this misconception to occur without being informative enough. Close-minded peasants are ONLY seeing this as "RENTALS ON PLAYSTATION" which is only a fraction of what this is. But it's the only portion of it which is relevant to them. So selfishly, they react as if it's the only thing the service does and critique the service in its entirety, based on the dissatisfaction they have with the small portion of it they intend to use without even considering what else it can do.

But WHAT ELSE CAN IT DO, I hear you asking? Let's say your name is Jorah Mormont. You're 40 years old and you like to rent movies to watch with the wife. You own a new TV, which has a netflix app on it, and you rent movies from that. You stream movies every night, and each one costs you $6. Then all of a sudden, one day a new app appears, called PS Now. And all of a sudden you can rent thousands of games that you can actually interact and play with, and they're all available instantaneously, in the same format your movies were. To you, this is like, holy mothersmurfing trout. Never played a game before in your life, only heard about them until this point, and now you have instant access to thousands of them, that person is impressed as smurf. But the generic close-minded console peasant on the other hand is like, why the smurf do I need this smurfing trout for? EVERYONE ELSE who isn't a Playstation gamer can be a Playstation gamer now, WITHOUT buying an entire console. PC gamers can play Playstation games now. Mobile gamers can play Playstation games now. Casual people with always-online devices, like TV's and mobiles can play Playstation games now. All without buying a single piece of Playstation hardware, all instantaneous and on demand. Just pay and play. THAT is convenience at its finest.

To people who own Playstations though, who can actually buy and play actual physical Playstation games, it's less relevant. Sony might present some alternative options, renting might be more relevant than buying in some cases, but the biggest and most important detail, which dumb smurf Playstation owners seem to be forgetting, is that the entire world can be a part of Playstation now. There are going to be millions upon millions of new accounts. The Playstation network is going to grow massively. That is amazing. Am I going to use Playstation now? Only when I'm not on my console. Is someone without a Playstation going to use Playstation now? Yeah, probably all the time. That's the difference, gaming can now be a streamable and on-demand service on any device. That's revolutionized Playstation. It's opened so many possibilities. And again, it's less relevant to people who already own Playstations. When PS Now goes live, there'll be apps on android devices, iOS, mobiles, tablets, televisions, set-top boxes like Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Roku, apps on PC, Mac, Linux... every single one of these platforms will usher in new PlayStation players. And it's sort of why they're targeting PS3 games. PS3 hardware is going to be phased out, but the games live on, instead of just phasing out the PS3 and 8 years of content with it can now offer that content to everyone else, who doesn't have a console. I think that's incredible. Can't say the same for any other console generation however, and that's a god damn shame. I mean, wouldn't it be amazing if you could just stream Mario 64 or Conker's Bad Fur Day to whatever device you had, except you can't, those games are forgotten, forever unless you can somehow get your hands on a N64 and a copy. But that's less convenient. And this is the whole point.

You can buy a $500 console and a $60 game or you can just use your TV/Phone/Pc and rent a game for $7. You choose.
Just stop being a guido and thinking this doesn't benefit millions of people out there that can't be smurfed buying a console.
Rant over. Now tell me how wrong I am.

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Originally Posted by Noctis Caelum

All without buying a single piece of Playstation hardware, all instantaneous and on demand. Just pay and play. THAT is convenience at its finest.

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Don't you need a Dualshock 3, though? I totally see your argument about this being valuable to non-PlayStation gamers but there's still so many problems on that front. The initial roll out will only include limited (presumably Sony-only) devices, the early game selection will be PS3-heavy and don't forget - there will be latency. All of those hold this back.

$8 a week sounds about right to me but they have a ways to go with those other pricing models.

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Originally Posted by Bolivar

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Originally Posted by Noctis Caelum

All without buying a single piece of Playstation hardware, all instantaneous and on demand. Just pay and play. THAT is convenience at its finest.

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Don't you need a Dualshock 3, though? I totally see your argument about this being valuable to non-PlayStation gamers but there's still so many problems on that front. The initial roll out will only include limited (presumably Sony-only) devices, the early game selection will be PS3-heavy and don't forget - there will be latency. All of those hold this back.

$8 a week sounds about right to me but they have a ways to go with those other pricing models.

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If you're playing on a TV, you could in theory use your remote. It wouldn't be recommended, but it would be possible. Technically. But sure, go to the store and buy a $30 DS3 if you want to optimize your experience. I'm just saying you wouldn't *HAVE* to do it.
As for a phone, absolutely not. iOS gamers are already used to playing games with their touch screen.

Considering the PS4 only has a handful of unique PS4 only games, I don't think the early game selection is a problem. The PS4 itself has way too many PS3 remasters as it is.

I don't understand what the problem is.

Is it too cheap? Too expensive?

Are people being forced to use this service against their will? :confused:

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Are people being forced to use this service against their will? :confused:

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We all know that free will and personal responsibility doesn't real because the medias and the gubberments.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

I don't understand what the problem is.

Is it too cheap? Too expensive?

Are people being forced to use this service against their will? :confused:

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It's included in the affordable care act ;)

Ahahahahahah

I could buy FF13-2 for £8. It took me over a week to finish that game because of how I video game. Why would I want to rent it for that amount of time when I could just buy it for cheaper? I hear that this pricing is solid for all games. Rent a 10 year old game for double what you can buy it in a shop for.

Sure their rationale behind it with the other means to video game such as TVs, etc, makes the decision make slightly more sense... but damn am I no longer interested in PSNow until they start going classic.

If this was like, say, netflix in that you spent X amount of money Per month, and you had access to all of them, then sure.

But it looks like that's the price per title.

Seriously, what the smurf?

I say just stick with doing the classic downloads like they were doing on PS3.

PS Now is a very ambitious move by Sony, but those prices are a bit ridiculous. Sure it's great you can play games even if you don't have a console, but surely a fixed monthly fee would be better than charging per title? When you pay for Netflix you have a cess to every film for that cost, PS Now should be no different. I suppose that publishers get a cut back from the rentals though so they have to do it per title to monitor who's spending on what games.

TL;DR - Basically, the idea is not bad, but the pricing is.

PS Now is a great idea. The idea that anyone can rent games is great. Pricing though, wow boy.

Here's a funny fact, FF13-2 price on PSN is $19.99 to get the full game outright. So to buy the game outright costs as much as to pay for access to it for 30 days and 4 hours. Alternatively I could buy a physical copy of the game from my local games retailer for £5 because there are that many unused copies flying around that it's dirt cheap. I wouldn't need a subscription service/cost of renting, nor decent internet to stream it.

This is taking from someone who owns a PS3. It's very cost effective because you don't need to pay for the hardware. Problem is these prices are reflective of the cost to rent new games. Would you pay $29.99 to rent Watch dogs for 90 days, sure. It'll be cheaper than buying the game and you'll probably be done with it in that 3 month period. This model is great for that. When you use anchoring tactics on old games to encourage sales, it's not the best. Seems shady and cause backlash.

The point that really annoys me though is the 4 hours price. $4.99 to buy 4 hours for a game. I doubt that anyone will every be willing to buy it for that price. The jump between 4 hours and 7 days is only a 60% increase in cost, but an extension of playtime 42 fold. It's designed for those that only want to play games in short bursts, like downloading the new call of duty to finish the entire campaign and then not having to buy it. Not so great for games where you need to invest several hours into it like FF13-2.

Realistically, what they would need to do is to change the time frame on the 4 hours up to 1 day. That would be more justified. I also expect there to be a subscription service similar to Netflix where you can buy full access to the PS1/2/3 library for $30 a month or something.

60 hours streaming Final Fantasy XIII requires a lot of bandwidth. Playing it from disc requires pretty much zero bandwidth. Playing it on a console is expected and not interesting at all. Playing it without a console at all is a mild breakthrough if it works properly. The people saying "I could buy this cheaper", are taking into consideration that they own a console that can play it. The people this service is for, have no console and only a Sony TV, and they are also granted access. For a price. And a LOT of bandwidth. Expensive bandwidth. I think the idea has merit. And no matter what game you play, no matter how old it is, it is hours upon hours of streaming content. I think that is where the pricing comes from. Streaming Xenogears for 80 hours is just as taxing as streaming Xenosaga for 80 hours. It's a full video feed. Not really anything more. And that's what the price is based on. So I don't blame them and I think it's pretty awesome. But I think the price should be based on hours played/streamed. Not based on how many days of access

What if you rent something and then someone in your family dies. If you had planned to play it all week, you just lost $30 for nothing. If you bought access to streaming it for 80 hours at 30 dollars, then that would be something. In fact, maybe they should base the whole system on that. Buy 10 hours of content for $5. And $100 hours of content for $30. And give like a 60 day expiration period or some subscription base or something

EDIT: Oops. By the time I got down here to reply, I had forgot the actual pricing. $30 is not a week access. You'd only have lost $8. Which I guess isn't terrible. But I still don't think it should be based on that. If I paid that $8 I'd kinda like to get my money's worth out of it eventually. But it's not as drastic a point as I was trying to make lol. Oh well..

But that's just my few cents on the idea. I still like that it exists, and don't mind the pricing like most people. But it could probably still use a little tweaking

If we're talking about streaming content, let's also talk about the massive problems that have arisen with cloud gaming since its inception: Lag and connection problems.

No matter how you set things up, there is going to be a latency delay between servers. This sort of lag depends on the connection and how much you're streaming, but it can still massively cripple MMOs (which are only streaming I/O feeds and not the video, which is all processed client side). So you need not only the bandwidth, but also the reliable connection and the server side system to handle it all.

Cloud gaming was this big huge idea. Gamers dreamed of what having an entire corporate server running a game would allow. But it sort of fell apart as gamers realized how big connection issues, or even basic light-lag of transmissions could interfere with a game, and as they realized that home consoles were quickly becoming just as capable for all reasonable purposes. If this is supposed to be a benefit to those without a console, it needs to be aimed at non-gamers. Which means marketing to casuals, which Sony is not currently doing. It also means making those casuals accept the massive problems that come along with it.

Also, while the price may make sense for what it gives at that level, it's still a failure. You'd still be paying for a console after only a couple dozen experiences, and you'd be getting a better experience out of it with the console. How many people are going to continually pay for a service that is going to perform like that, go down at inopportune times, and be massively overpriced in comparison to the competition of used games and used consoles?

If they're marketing to gamers, they're doing it wrong because they're charging way too much for people who aren't going to use 90% of the service and they still haven't solved the problems inherent with the idea of cloud gaming. If they're marketing to non-gamers, they're doing it wrong because they aren't marketing to them currently, nor have they fully considered how the non-gamer market will bear the cost or troubles.

I don't think this system is going to work.