A friend asked to borrow my PS3. He intends to subscribe to PS Now, play the games he wants and return my PS3. PS Now is also a feature of Sony Blu-ray players that retail for around $70. Effectively making ‘high quality’ gaming cheaply available. If Blu-ray players aren’t your thing, Sony and Samsung offer PS Now on a handful of TVs.
Chime in on this question:
Do you think dedicated gaming hardware will eventually be non-existent once streaming becomes a true 1:1 replacement, resulting in all gamers subscribing to a service instead of buying individual games?
Oz:
Isn’t this what OnLive tried to do? Let’s be honest here, I don’t own a PlayStation or plan to, but knowing that I could get PS Now on a new Sony television or even a Blu-ray player to stream my games sounds like a great idea. If I want to pay for a single title, or even just subscribe to a monthly fee for the archive, at least I’ll be able to play some of those exclusives that I kept hearing about as I played on a different console.
Overall I’ve been on board with a different pay structure for video games for a while. In previous DRULcasts, Jack and I tried to break down what that would exactly look like, but it’s hard to put a price on certain types of games. I already pay for other services for music, movies, and TV, why not add another form of entertainment: gaming. I’d like to know how EA Access is doing, if I were a sports fan, I feel like I’d be all over that service.
Jack:
Yes, subscription models are the only way to go. Gamers will have access to more games, and will more likely try games they otherwise would not have played. In a subscription model, I would gladly download Call of Duty or Rainbow Six: Siege to play a few matches with friends, but I would never buy those games. Additionally I would have tried Watch_Dogs, which looks interesting but not interesting enough to buy. By trying any of those games, I may end up liking them more than I think, which could lead me to buying a sequel that I would not have otherwise purchased.
Modern hardware is pretty amazing. What used to take two chips, can now be packaged into one. As hardware evolves and becomes more powerful in smaller packages, it will be put into more devices at lower price points and give people access to a range of content they wouldn’t have been previously exposed to. Consoles may definitely become a thing only found in history books as devices like Blu-ray players and TVs become more powerful and could be capable of natively running a modern game at a high resolution with high quality graphics.
References:
PS Now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Now
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/psnow/devices/
Shouts to Sega Channel for being an awesome subscription service and way ahead of its time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMRLZcBiN-k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel
Post image composed from:
console by Joel Wisneski from the Noun Project
Trash Can by Aya Sofya from the Noun Project
