Kyle Orland stumbles out of the starting gate.
But he does touch on one aspect that might warrant additional discussion.
Today, every major gaming company and its subsidiary cousin is aiming to be the "Netflix of games" in some form or another. Xbox Game Pass, Apple Arcade, Google Play Pass, Ubisoft's UPlay+, EA Access, and even Nintendo's Switch Online all bundle together access to dozens or hundreds of games for one low monthly fee. And then there's PlayStation Now.
His numbers for Game Pass are dubious, his central premise (that Sony need to start offering blockbuster games, including AAA narative-driven single-player games, on day 1) ignores the negative consequences that might bring, including restricting their ability to make those type of games in the future, has been discussed to death, and his gloomy conclusion feels premature given the recent rise in subscription numbers, which he didn't appear to know about until someone pointed it out to him in the comment section.Sony's service started offering monthly subscription game bundles back in the beginning of 2015, long before most of the competition. But a mix of confused marketing and limited access to Sony's own first-party catalog has left the service to languish with just one million subscribers (compared to a reported 9.5 million monthly subscribers for Xbox Game Pass).
[Update: Replaced outdated 700,000 subscriber number for PS Now from May]
But he does touch on one aspect that might warrant additional discussion.
PlayStation Now isn't exclusively a streaming service anymore. A subscription now also includes access to downloadable versions of over 300 PS4 and PS2 games. [...] That last feature was rolled out just over a year ago and seems like a pretty important addition for the significant segment of the audience that might be worried about streaming gaming's potential latency and quality issues. By and large, though, PlayStation Now's partial pivot to downloads doesn't seem to have filtered down to the intended audience.
SourceLast month, an informal poll of my Twitter followers found 54% of respondents (who all said they had heard of PlayStation Now) still didn't know the service also offered downloads. That's not a scientific result, of course, but it suggests a large part of the potential audience still sees PlayStation Now primarily as an expensive streaming service for legacy PlayStation titles, as it was when it launched.
That's an interesting mindset you have. I pointed out the glaring errors first in the hope of getting over them. If I had not done that, this thread would have gone downhill fast with repeat responses calling attention to the same obvious errors as a means to discredit everything else that is written. There are worthy points for discussion in the article. Let's discuss those.Thread backfire? I see the intention was to attack the article but yeah we have people in this very thread not knowing it offered downloads
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