Rumors suggest the PS4 will soon be able to emulate retro PlayStation games. But what does that mean for PlayStation Now?
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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.
Emulate.
As great as the idea of streaming sounds, there's always going to be latency issues as long as there's distance between your (sexy) PS4 and the PSNow server. While streaming might be great for slow-paced games and strategy titles like TLoU and Uncharted, fast-twitch games like CoD are going to be a problem. Any ping that's over 100ms is going to feel a bit noticeable, not to mention the input lag and TV lag piled on top of that.
I hope Sony does add emulation though, and that we can use our discs. I've got loads of PS2 games saved up from my childhood that are just waiting to be played.
Crash Nitro Kart
NBA Street Vol. 2
Jak & Daxter
GTA San Andreas
Gran Turismo 4
Kingdom Hearts
NBA Live 2005 (Back when it was good)
Aaargh, right in the childhood
Local hardware >>>> Internet. For now and 12+ years at least until ISP give us all fast fibre connections with no data caps(Pipe dream for some countries sadly) But one can only hope.
Emulate by a long shot. Everyone can enjoy it then.
Is there even a debate here?
Emulation.
Ideally, both. But there is no denying running a game via the hardware itself is better than streaming the content.
Give it a while, Microsoft will have the same for Xbox.