CCC Says: "Sony just blew a lot of goodwill. How, you ask? Well then, clearly you haven't heard the bad news over which PS3, PS4 and Vita owners are lamenting and Microsoft and Nintendo fans are gloating. The PlayStation Now Beta is now a paid program, and the prices aren't cheap. To give a general idea, the basic price for a PS3 title that was originally sold at retail can range from $2.99-4.99 per 4 hours, $5.99-$7.99 for a week, and $14.99-$29.99 to have it for 90 days. Even PlayStation Store exclusives, like Crazy Taxi, follow the same pricing model as the low-end retail games."
PlayStation dominated cloud gaming users throughout 2021, beating Microsoft's xCloud streaming by over 10%, but Xbox swings back at PlayStation in 2022.
“In 2022, Microsoft took the lead with 60-70% of total MAUs”
From 20-30% up to 60-70%? That’s some crazy growth. Probably thanks to Fortnite.
What a clickbait headline. Why mention 2021, when the tides turned in 2022 for the obvious reason of one company making the Cloud service one of their biggest marketing pushes throughout the entire year while the other company was able to promote the games they had coming out?
And it's imprudent to suggest crazy growth when we only know proportions - did Xbox grow its proportion by attracting from the competitors' bases, did their marketing pay off and attract new users, or did cloud gamers on competitors just not play as much? The MAU figures don't point to shifts as significant as the Cloud proportions do, and Microsoft's lack of raw subscriber numbers that they happily boasted about in 2021 is telling too.
The PlayStation Brahs:
"Playstation Now will soon cease as exist as it combines with PlayStation Plus to be one super subscription, titles that won't carryover to the PlayStation Plus revamp will begin to leave the service in May."
Wait, what? I thought PS+ premium would carry over the games from PSNow?
Also this basically leaves MGS4 dead in the boneyard unless you play via RPCS3…
It's actually a lot of games that will leave at the same time.
Probably to leave some space for the PSP games that are gonna be added to the premium service.
As for MGS4, I would expect Konami to be behind the move.
Ah, yes. Bask in the "service" era. Where what you see today, is not what you'll see tomorrow, thanks to an overcomplicated system.
The "service", is simply, off the charts.
So when games leave PS Now, it's a huge issue but when games leave GamePass it's just fine? All subscription services have games / movies leave all the time.
Get PS Plus Premium at half off the price by subscribing to PS Now for 12 months! Sony has pulled the annual offer on PSN, but here are live links offering it for US and UK.
Umm ever consider it will probably just give you the basic ps plus for one year and you will need to upgrade to get the premium one?
They could give it to us for a dollar to get those numbers up before it launches.
Just kidding.
Don't let the link open in the app, it doesn't work. Open it in a web browser and it will work
The link in the article goes to a page that says "Not available for purchase." When I click on the link from the Twitter post, it works though. https://twitter.com/Wario64...
They have no set prices yet
This is ridiculous...
"The fact that Sony expects people participating to pay is. The idea of a beta is to determine if a service is working"
It is also to see if people are willing to pay for it. A Beta isn't just testing the product (i.e. is it stable) but testing the service as a whole and paying is a big part of the service (considering this type of service on a grand scale is fairly new so pricing is initially going to be a bit iffy). Sony have already come out and said these prices are on publisher input and are subject to change. The question is will they? Which I hope so as the price is too much.
Who wrote this crap?
@"The high prices aren't the only problem with this change to the PlayStation Now beta. The fact that Sony expects people participating to pay is. The idea of a beta is to determine if a service is working. Charging at this stage is going to deter people from doing something very important: trying the games. If people aren't playing the PlayStation Now beta titles because they aren't willing to shell out $2.99-$4.99 for a few hours of a dated title, Sony won't know if the servers can stand the load. They also won't get valuable feedback on how the game is running for customers depending on the platform, internet provider and service provider."
"Sony won't know if the servers can stand the load"
? What the hell do you think the closed beta was for?
Handle the load? The service has been tested and it works. I was part of the beta testing and there was little to no lag. I have a 25/10 mbps connection and the service works just fine.
The second thing is these prices that are being quoted by the author aren't final. What a jackass.