PSnow

By: Patrick "TheLaw" Morris

The major hardware developers are constantly looking to push the envelope and fundamentally change the way we play games. Microsoft did it when they built the Xbox 360 from the ground up to be an online centered experience, Sony did it when they crammed what was nearly the power of the PlayStation 2 into your pocket just four years after the launch of the original PS2, and Nintendo is constantly reinventing the wheel with varying degrees of success. But one innovation that seems to be an almost certainty at this point is game streaming. Microsoft is focusing on streaming with project Xcloud, and Google has even entered the industry relying on a fully streaming offering. But the player that has had the capability to stream games directly to your living room longer than anyone else has been Sony. As we hurdle toward a game streaming future Sony has taken a different approach entirely by offering a complimentary service to the traditional gaming experience as opposed to trying to replace what is already functioning almost perfectly.

Welcome welcome welcome everyone welcome back to LegalSpeak a ColdNorth Production. I'm TheLawMorris and this is the video essay series in which I get to talk about the games I've been playing and what I think of the medium as a whole. Sony finally convinced me to sub to their game streaming service PlayStation now and after about a month of having it available to me on my PlayStation I've got some thoughts, so lets talk about PSnow.

Quick disclaimer here: I may sound like I'm bashing one service or another but if you start to think that just know that I love Gamepass and think it is an amazing service that has absolutely disrupted the industry in an incredible way over the last two years. Competition is king because that’s whats best for all of us so I will cheer on any company that forces the others to compete and that’s what this video is about.

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of this week's topic lets just bring everyone who may not know the specifics of PSnow up to speed. In the middle of 2012 Sony acquired Gaikai a forward thinking games streaming service for the cool price of $380m. As the seventh generation of consoles was coming to a close at the time of this acquisition it was obvious that this was an acquisition to be utilized in Sony's upcoming console that was at the time presumably called the PlayStation 4. In late 2014 the public finally got their hands on PSnow and the reception was lackluster to say the least. I remember very clearly hearing about the concept and saying to my roommate at the time that this was just going to end up being another subscription bill that I see as a must have similar to Netflix. I was a big believer in PSnow from the start but the monetization model at launch made it less of the "Netflix of gaming" and more just a pitiful substitute for true backwards compatibility.

When the service officially launched in late 2014 it wasn’t a single monthly fee for all you can play like I had naively imagined it would be, it was more of a rental service in which you paid a few dollars to rent the right to stream the game for a limited amount of time. Thankfully this didn’t last long and they moved to a slightly less insane but still overpriced model that did fulfill the all you can play dream but at a price that was abhorrently high for the games the service had to offer. After settling into this prohibitive pricing structure the service would remain there for years looking as though it had fallen into the no mans land of forgotten Sony projects of which the PSvita is the mayor. But recently the service has had some new life breathed into it. In September of 2018 Sony announced that they were bringing the capability to download the PS2 and PS4 games offered on the service to the console drastically improving the overall experience for those titles. And then in early October in what Sony themselves said was a  direct response to their competition they cut the price significantly.

As it stands now PSnow is an all you can play service that offers nearly 900 games spanning three generations of PlayStation. Players can stream PS2, PS3, and PS4 games and have the option to download PS2 and PS4 games. PSnow can be used on a PS4 and a PC both requiring the use of DualShock 4 but both platforms having wireless options for connectivity available to them. And all this can be done for one low monthly price. Man that last paragraph has me thinking I should really consider a career as an infomercial guy.

But anyway this is all great in theory but one of the main reasons that PSnow didn’t catch on when it first launched and one of the main reasons people are still hesitant to adopt streaming platforms is because it's a much less reliable technology than just running the game locally. If the technology doesn’t provide a passable experience for the premium then there is no sense in paying. When Sony first moved the service into the monthly subscription model I used a free seven day trial to see how it worked and while my internet conditions weren't ideal they were better than a lot of the PS4 userbase has available to them and back then in 2015 the service was down right unusable. It was slow to connect, low res, choppy, and the latency was something I found myself actively correcting for. The technology was clearly not ready for prime time. But years later Sony wiped the slate clean and gave everyone another free seven day trial and to my surprise the service has come a long way. It's still not something I would wan to use as my primary means of playing games but its certainly passable. Resolution is still capped at 720p which in the age of 4K might as well be SD, the framerates are still a bit slower than I would like but overall games were playable and after my second seven day free trial I was ready to jump on board, that is until I saw the price.

The lowest rate being $100 per year that came out to $8.33 per month it was still to much to ask for what the service had to offer. But that was all back in September. On October 1st Sony slashed the price of PSnow across the board. The month to month price was cut from $20 to $10 (not coincidentally right in line with Microsoft's Gamepass), the three month price was reduce from $45 to $25, and the annual price went from $100 to just $60, the price of just one game per year. Suddenly what was a service that was struggling to compete on the downloading front with Gamepass and is somehow already seen as a runner up in the streaming space to a product that hasn’t even launched yet is offering an incredible value for literally the price of a Starbucks coffee once per month.

But like I mentioned earlier Sony isn't the only one looking toward either a streaming or a subscription service future for the games industry. Both Microsoft and Google are making a play at capturing that segment of the market that has been priced out of the hobby. Microsoft's Gamepass is a subscription service with more than 200 games ALL available for download with one pricing option available for $10 on Xbox or $5 on PC. Google is taking a different approach, they’ve employed a two part tariff in which the user pays $10 month for the ability to stream games through Stadia and then requires the player to buy games at full retail price. While Google does offer an option that removes the monthly cost entirely it comes at the price of frame rate and resolution and still requires users to buy the right to stream games for full retail cost.

In my mind Sony has made two key moves that have turned PSnow from a obligatory service they keep alive to keep up the appearance of competing in this space to something that is truly a must have and the imaginative different approach to streaming that has gotten me on board. They're offering something that is the answer to both Stadia and Gamepass rolled into one and they're doing it for half the cost of one of those services. Sony's move to a $5 per month paid annually price point was without a doubt a deliberate move to adjust the expectations of what the service will deliver. Suddenly its gone from feeling the need to get my $20 worth every to one of those things that I don’t even think about because of how cheap it is and I just like having it there.

There are plenty of movies that aren't amongst the best movies I've ever seen but were enjoyable none the less. Movies that I would have never had enough interest in to seek out and spend money on but when I watched them they became one that I could easily suggest for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Movies that I would have never seen without my perpetual Netflix subscription, and that’s exactly what PSnow is becoming. PSnow has almost 900 games most of which I would never go out of my way to play or spend money on but by removing almost all barriers to entry leads to me experimenting with a ton of games I would have never tried before. I never played Ratchet and Clank until the 2016 remake and I loved it but by that time the PS3 was so far in the rear view mirror that I wasn’t about to dust it off and find a used copy of A Crack in Time just to play some more Ratchet and Clank. I have fond memories of playing the demo of Motorstorm in Wal-Mart when the PS3 launched but I couldn’t be bothered to spend my money on the game. And God of War is a narrative driven adventure that after playing the PS4 game I was interested in learning more about the older games but it was just to much of a hassle. These are all games that I would have never played had it not been for PSnow. They're not the best games of all time but they're fun enough experiences that  at $5 per month they make PSnow a complete no brainer.

Sony has taken major strides towards turning PSnow into the complimentary streaming service that could become a huge part of the PlayStation ecosystem moving forward but there is still work to be done. Sony's number one priority when it comes to new features for PSnow needs to be  mobile. With iOS13 finally supporting the DualShock 4 and Xbox one controller natively the prospect of nearly 900 games streaming directly to my phone is incredibly exciting. Sony did a great job by whittling down the number of supported devices in an effort to focus on the core experience but the mobile space is a major sticking point for Stadia and if Sony could beat Stadia to iPhones and most Androids that could be hugely beneficial. Speaking of Stadia there is one thing that Google thought of that their competitors didn’t: Wi-Fi in the controller. As we move into the future of streaming latency is going to be public enemy number one and the controller skipping a step and connecting directly to the server rather than the device and then the server is a stroke of genius.

When Microsoft announced Gamepass it was a revolutionary new way to deliver games to players. When Google announced Stadia they immediately had my interest and while the graveyard of abandoned Google services will most likely prevent me from ever buying a game on Stadia I will be interested to see how well it handles. Just a few months ago Sony was a distant third in the race to bring a subscription and or streaming service to relevance but with the two pronged approach of making it a secondary more complimentary add on rather than a replacement for the traditional experience and pricing so competitively you would think Sony is going under I think Sony has leap frogged their two biggest competitors and become the first subscription service that I'm willing to pay for. Now I just need a PSnow app to live on the home screen of my phone and I'll be happy.

Have you tried PSnow? What are your thoughts on it and which of these three services do you think will be the one to really break through all the apprehension and be adopted mainstream? Let me know in the comments down below. And while you're down there don’t forget to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. Go check out everything we do all in one spot over at ColdNorthPro.com, I'll be back next week talking about something else I haven't really decided yet so until then just go play some games!