Although PS Now has seen a huge improvement in recent times and we did start to see some potential in how it could give the Game Pass a run for its money, there was always a sense that it was only a matter of time before Sony pulled the plug.
The revamped PlayStation Plus is Sony’s attempt to bury PS Now and offer something better. In some ways, the three-tiered subscription service that’s coming in June is an improvement. The only problem is that Sony might have effectively killed a huge portion of PS Now’s niche market. It didn’t make sense for Sony to one-up Microsoft with day-one releases and a larger library. Sony has mentioned before how the former just doesn’t make economical sense. At the same time, Sony is sitting on a treasure trove of first-party titles that easily dwarves what Microsoft has to offer - even when you throw in everything that came with the ZeniMax Media buyout and what’s going to come once the tech giant owns Activision Blizzard. Unfortunately, replacing the existing PS Now streaming service with PlayStation Plus Premium, the most expensive tier, puts gamers who liked streaming PlayStation games in a bind. Currently, PS Now subscribers can enjoy streaming PlayStation games on the PC for $59.99 a year or $9.99 a month. Now with Premium, Sony is asking the few willing to put up with PS Now’s jankiness to pony up more than double what they’re already paying for to enjoy a service that they won’t fully appreciate anyway. At $19.99 a month or $119.99 a year, current PS Now subscribers who only game on their desktops might have no choice but to pray harder that PlayStation Studios releases native PC ports of popular PlayStation-exclusive titles like Bloodborne and The Last of Us. Keep in mind, we’re talking about PC-exclusive gamers here, the ones who routinely enjoy dirt-cheap games bundles and aren’t as enamored with the allure of classic PlayStation games. TLDR; Sony just screwed PC gamers. Defending Sony’s short-sighted slight to PC gamers is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. You can’t just say that this is unintentional without making PC gamers feel like they are an afterthought. This is a backslide when you consider how much effort Sony has put in recent years porting over its biggest exclusives to the PC platform via PlayStation Studios, a move that has brought the likes of Days Gone and God of War beyond PlayStation for the first time with Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection coming next. The good news here is that Sony still has time to make a few changes to the PlayStation Plus rebrand so that the PC audiences don’t have to pay for an unnecessary premium. The bad news is that this is probably far from Sony’s priority.
