Brandon J. Kessler's Blog

My Personal Ramblings

Game Review - PlayStation Now

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Review

I’ve had Playstation Now (PSNow) for almost 6 months. It’s Sony’s answer to Microsoft’s Xbox Games Pass (which I haven’t used so no in-depth comparisons there). I picked it up when it was on sale for $42 instead of it’s normal $60 for 12 months. Quick math says that’s $5 a month regularly, and less than $4 on sale. So what are you getting for the price of a “medium” coffee from an international coffee chain?

PSNow is very much like Netflix for video games. Unlike Xbox Game Pass, which requires you to download the titles (excluding xCloud), PSNow is truly streaming, except when it isn’t (I’ll get to that later) So, for instance, if you want to test out a PS4 game you can start playing immediately. I did this with “Knack”, which looked like it could be interesting but I’ve never played. I fired it up and started streaming right away. I didn’t like it at all. What’s great is I didn’t have to wait for it to download just to find out I hated it. On the other hand, you CAN download and install PS4 titles to a PS4. I own Spiderman on a disc, but a few months ago Spiderman was available in PSNow, so I downloaded and installed it so I could just run it when I wanted to, instead of having to swap out the disc. Games are added on a monthly to semi-monthly basis, and usually a range of genres, like FPS, RPG, and sports.

PSNow also has PS3 games available, but those are streaming only affairs. There’s no Download and Install option. Generally speaking there are all the major hits for PS3, and with Comcast/Xfinity 100MBps broadband I never see any major hiccups. I am running Wifi 5 off the ISP’s equipment and the PS4 is connected via the 5Ghz band. That being said, if you play a ton of PS3 games I could see your monthly data limit being hit pretty quickly.

There are a handful of PS2 games, like Dark Cloud and Dark Cloud 2, and Rogue Galaxy. At the time of this writing there are less than 20 games, so don’t expect a massive back library. Disappointingly, there’s no PS1 games. I’d love to see the PS1 games available on the PS3 to be added. I’ve been playing Chrono Cross on my PS3 and while I own the disk, it’s nice to just launch it straight from the HDD on the PS3. There were hundreds of quality PS1 games that could be introduced to gamers in the next generation.

PSNow also works with Playstation Plus (PSPlus) subscriptions with Cloud saves, however it’s not a fully baked idea. PSNow saves all your streamed games in their own little “cloud” separate from PSPlus, BUT if you download a PS4 game to your PS4 it decides to use the PSPlus cloud, which is not the same. You CAN sync your PSNow cloud save to the PSPlus cloud, but it’s a manual process. So you can copy your save data from PSPlus to PSNow, or from PSNow to PSPlus, but you have to actively do it. I almost lost all of my sava data from Spiderman when Sony removed it from the Service. Luckily, the save data was still in PSNow and I could copy it over to PSPlus so that I could then download the game and play it.

That brings me to the second biggest issue. There’s no guarantee for games to stay in the service. That’s true for most of the game services out there, but PSNow does not have an obvious section for games leaving soon. And as a Parent-Gamer with a full schedule of being an adult, some of the games are only there for a few months. I can’t finish some of the big games, like Final Fantasy XV that would require 40 – 80 hours in the next 90-ish days. Metro Exodus also seems to only have been in PSNow for a month or two and it’s gone as of November 30th.

PSNow is the most flexible of the major solutions out there with the option to stream and download games. It has a PC client that allows gamers to play great PS3/4 games without owning the consoles, and there are both AAA titles from big companies and a great selection of indie titles to choose from on both PS3 and PS4. The option to download games to a PS4 means that if you have a data-cap on your home internet you’re not going to blow through it as quickly as streaming all your games. And that may be the biggest reason not to get it, or any game streaming service. It will eat your data like crazy. But at $5 a month ($60 annually) I would recommend getting it. There are enough quality games from multiple generations to keep any gamer happy for a while.

With the launch of the PS5, it will be interesting to see what Sony does with the service going forward.