PlayStation Now always seemed like a good idea, executed poorly. The concept of granting the PS4 backwards compatibility through new-age game streaming was cool (as was playing games without a console altogether, using some devices), but a clunky pay-per-view model with wildly varying prices across different games and rental periods made the entire thing something of a mess.

But while that option is still there, Sony has listened to critics who were hoping for something closer to a Netflix model of game consumption. As such, they’ve just debuted a new subscription model for the service which will kick off in North America January 13th. It’s either $20 a month or $45 for three months, which are the only two packages so far in this experimental stage. That will grant players access to 100+ PS3 games, including some heavy hitters like Uncharted, BioShock Infinite, The Last of Us and Arkham Asylum.

I believe a hundred or so games available means that some titles will be left behind from the original PS Now set-up. The hard part of a subscription-based system was always going to be getting all the publishers on board. This is why we saw such variance in pricing, as it wasn’t Sony setting the numbers. But now they appear to have worked out a good enough deal with a proper amount of publishers in order to make this subscription happen.



The value for PS Now just wasn’t there before. The weird pricing system meant 90-day rentals often cost more than what you could buy the game for used, or sometimes even on sale in the PS Store itself, and the base four-hour rental period was laughably short. Now, with a flat flee as a blanket covering all these games, it seems a lot more plausible that PS Now could end up being a good deal for many.

At essentially $15 a month, if you play more than a handful of PS Now’s games in a given month, you’ve probably already made back your money. Under the old system, just a four-hour rental was anywhere from $3-5, with a week’s worth of play around double that. With that as a reference, the subscription is just going to be an unequivocally better deal 95% of the time, it seems.

A few of these games may be dirt cheap as used copies at this point, but the idea behind PS Now is that if you’re using the service, you probably don’t own a PS3 for whatever reason. Either you don’t have a console at all, meaning that PS Now could be a pretty great value on enabled devices, or you’ve moved on with your life and hawked your PS3 to partially pay for a PS4, but still would like access to older games you either miss playing or never played.

For me personally, PS Now probably still isn’t worth the money, given that I’ve already played the vast majority of the “major” titles in this list of 100+, and there are few games I’ve missed that would be worth paying either $20 or $45 to access. Like sure, maybe I never got around to the Grid or Overlord series, but it’s not enough of a nagging itch that I need to get a Now subscription to catch up. My current-gen backlog is long enough as is, and ironically, despite my previous complaints, individual rentals of specific games may be enough for me.

With that said, I won’t claim to speak for everyone, and I think PS Now is still a solid concept and is only made better by a subscription option. For players who have missed out on a lot of great last-gen games, I’m not sure there’s a better way to catch up with them. In my time using PS Now so far, I’ve had no technical problems streaming games, which is frankly something of a miracle in the current, fragile online gaming landscape. The system works as intended, and if the catalog of available games continues to expand (eventually to PS 1 and 2 games as well, Sony says), it will become a better and better value over time.

Does PS Now appeal to you more now that it has a subscription model?