Since its inception,PlayStation Nowhas come in second to theheadline grabbing PlayStation Plusin the eyes of many fans. As Sony’s premier subscription service has expanded and become an increasingly integral part of the PlayStation ecosystem, PS Now has often been relegated to the side-lines and overlooked in comparison. Despite having been available on four separate PlayStation systems, Windows, and even a host of TVs, the service yet to really capture the limelight.
Many are curious if Sony is intending to grow thePS Nowbrand, as a way of competing with Game Pass, or if it’ll be something different. For many reasons, PS Now has always done what it does well, seemingly beating its own drum. How and when it joins the wider band really remains to be seen, but it does seem like it’ll get there.
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PS Now’s Inception
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear there’s always been subtle hints ever since PS Now was unveiled to world that it wasn’t immediately going to be at the forefront of Sony’s digital strategies and growth. Choosing to announce the service at CES in January 2014 for example, as opposed to a more populargaming centric event like E3, shows there’s been an internal tentativeness within Sony surrounding pushing PS Now to the mainstream public from the very beginning.
While it’s impossible to know for sure the reasoning behind such choices, it’s likely due to the nature of streaming games: back then, it seemed unviable by many (and still is). However, there’s been a push for more and more cloud or streaming based services, and PS Now has picked up on this if not exactly in great number.Bigger games come more often to PS Nowthan they used to, showing how PS Now has slowly grown into its own, if not into stardom.
Aside from the welcome addition to download certain PS4 and PS2 games, as well as the addition of a 1080p streaming option, not much else has changed about how players use the service in the big picture though. In October 2019, PS Now reached a status quo and a state that it hasn’t been expanded upon in any major way since.
PS Now Is Here To Stay, But It Needs to Grow
Acquiring Gaikai in 2012 set Sony back to the tune of $380 million, which is more than it had to shell out tobring Insomniac Games to the first party table. To a certain extent, that ensures Sony and its stakeholders will be reluctant to see what has been built over the last decade vanish completely without a trace.
However, Any fundamental change revolving around how players access and stream certain games on PlayStation also seems unlikely to receive any major shakeup. A big section of the800+ PS Now game libraryis still dedicated to PS3 games, which due to the challenges that have persisted around that system’s CELL technology, means emulating those games in any other fashion is still a tricky prospect to see changing. PS Now has formed an integral role in backwards compatibility, so having that section of PlayStation history represented is also too much of a boon to imagine Sony abandoning it any time soon either. In other words, the requirement and need of PS Now is really obvious, but taking that to the next level would go a long way,
PS Now’s Rebranding Opportunity
Some form of rebranding for PS Now seems the most likely destination for where game streaming will go next on PlayStation. Not only would this give Sony a chance to rejuvenate its marketing approach to the feature, but it would also allow the company to continue to make back the money it’s already invested into the technology. Recent attempts to shut down thePlayStation Store on the PS3, PS Vitaand PSP could be an indicator that a wholesale reshuffling of Sony’s entire online ecosystem could be on the cards soon, which would conveniently open the door for PS Now to be given a new lease of life like this at the same time.
With Xbox Game Pass continuing to grow in popularity and value there’s an increasing sense that PlayStation needs to respond in some way. Making PS Plus an all in one tool that incorporates online multiplayer, streaming and video would be a smart way to achieve this, especially if any form of price hike is ever involved.
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