At the Consumer Electronics Show on Tuesday, Sony announced the first concrete details of PlayStation Now, its streaming games service that will deliver PlayStation games to a variety of different devices – game consoles, yes, but also tablets, smartphones, and smart TVs.
The announcement came sooner than I expected; with the PlayStation 4 console only having just launched in November (and not even available in Japan yet), I imagined Sony would take its time before committing to rolling out this major initiative. Instead, it says it'll be beta-testing PlayStation Now in North America later this month, before PS4 even launches in its home country, and rolling it out for real in the summer.
But don't be bamboozled: For as rapidly as Sony is introducing the on-demand games service, its messaging at CES is telegraphing the idea that PlayStation Now is going to have a slow, gradual ramp up to its full potential. PlayStation Now might better be dubbed PlayStation (A Couple Years From) Now.
We don't really know that much more today than we did a year ago, when David Perry, whose game streaming company Gaikai had recently been swallowed up into the Sony machine, took the stage at the pseudo-unveiling of PlayStation 4 to confirm that his technology would allow PS4 to stream older PlayStation games. That's a narrow view of what Gaikai can accomplish; the real end goal is streaming everything on everything. Sony is making that point clear at CES, pointing out that PlayStation Now will eventually let you stream content to a wide array of different devices, and from the PlayStation 1, 2 and 3 platforms.
On the official PlayStation blog, a Sony rep confirmed that in addition to PlayStations 1 and 2, Sony is "considering measures" to allow players to stream PlayStation 4 games via Now. And that is the real potential game-changer; the ability to play PS4 without a PS4.
But Sony has no stated timeline for any of this. Here's what it's saying is going to happen this summer: The only games on the service will be from the PlayStation 3 library, and the only devices that Now will work on are the PS3, PS4 and certain 2014 models of Bravia television. Everything else is coming "eventually."
Content is important; Sony has published many games over the last 20 years, but not enough to fill up a streaming service's catalog by itself. So third-party software makers, particularly those who have extensive back catalogs of PlayStation software, will need to be convinced to provide those games, and lots of them. But Sony didn't announce any partners.
And the big question: Do gamers want PlayStation Now? That is to say, do they want it enough to pay what it will cost to have such a service? Sony is looking at a two-tiered system, like Amazon's streaming video service: You can rent big-name games by paying for them individually, and an all-you-can-play service that includes many but not all games will be available for a recurring subscription fee. This is a sensible path, since the player who wants to spend a few bucks to rent a recent release is not necessarily the same as the player who wants to mess around with old PlayStation 1 games.
But it's possible that players might balk at whatever price Sony puts on on-demand game streaming. I say this because I'm seeing a lot of gamers comment that they believe that they should be entitled to PlayStation Now for free. To be fair, Sony might have created this situation. It used David Perry's speech at that conference last year to drop the bad news bomb that PlayStation 4, unlike all previous platforms, would not be backward compatible with older games.
Why was poor David Perry chosen to throw himself on that grenade? Because he could soften the blow by saying that although PS4 wouldn't "natively" support older games, it could play older games via Gaikai. Thanks, at least in part, to this conflation of two separate features, gamers seemed to come out of that presentation with the idea that you'd take a PlayStation 2 disc, pop it in your PS4, and Sony would then stream that game to you. Many, many commenters on today's PlayStation blog post believe that Now should incorporate exactly this feature, intimating that for Sony to charge them to stream "the games they already own" would be double billing.
Since this is not going to happen, no more so than you would be allowed to use Netflix for free if you proved you owned a copy of Young Frankenstein on Betamax, one wonders what these players' reaction will be when Sony actually does announce how much it plans to charge for Now, and what they'll get in return. When your customers believe that they should be given unlimited content for free, how do you break it to them that your proposal is actually a finite amount of content in exchange for money?
Add to this the fact that Sony is already charging many of its customers a recurring fee, since it has its PlayStation Plus service that enables multiplayer gaming on PS4 among other benefits. Will it be able to convince PlayStation owners that they want to have two credit card impressions a month? Will they roll everything into a gold-tier plan that gives you the whole shebang at a discount?
And then there's the even bigger question: Is this how people want to consume videogames, at all?
I'm definitely bullish on the idea of the all-you-can-stream gaming service for PlayStation, and have been since Sony acquired Gaikai in the first place. But it's hard to ignore the fact that every other experiment like this has failed. Turner's way-ahead-of-its-time GameTap never took off. OnLive went bankrupt. Both services are still trudging along, but no one cares, and so what's going to make PlayStation Now any different?
If PlayStation Now's fortunes are different, the game catalog will have been the deciding factor. If Sony can get all the major third parties to fill the service up with a true long tail of PlayStation classics, it will be tempting to have it as an option. It's so much easier to recommend obscure old movies to friends by saying "It's on Netflix." They can watch it with zero hassle or investment. Same thing with getting them to go try an old game. To this end, Sony should not restrict PlayStation Now to just PlayStation platforms, not when it could also include classic arcade games or Sega Genesis titles.
Today's announcement, for those keeping a close eye on the game industry, seems to have acted as something of a litmus test of one's prior assumptions. If you see Sony's 4 million unit launch of PlayStation 4 as an indication that traditional game consoles are going to be bigger than ever, you're likely to read PlayStation Now as being another jewel in PS4's crown. If you see game consoles losing their dominance, you might read this announcement as an indicator of Sony shifting its focus away from dedicated game boxes and onto everything else.
No matter how it shakes out, Sony's own statements this week should make it clear that whatever changes Now brings to the PlayStation universe will be happening... eventually, not now.
