PlayStation Now - could Sony go after Valve?

baten

Regular
Sony will be launching Playstation Now - Gaikai - this year. It will bring old PS, PS2 and PS3 games to almost any Sony product (PS4, mobile, Vita, tablets and TV).

I was thinking - why limit this service only to PS games? Why not go for all PC games and go after Valve's customers? Would that be not possible?
 
Sony will be launching Playstation Now - Gaikai - this year. It will bring old PS, PS2 and PS3 games to almost any Sony product (PS4, mobile, Vita, tablets and TV).

I was thinking - why limit this service only to PS games? Why not go for all PC games and go after Valve's customers? Would that be not possible?

Perhaps to avoid alienating the PS experience.
 
Perhaps to avoid alienating the PS experience.

It would offer PC plus PS experience to all - that's even better.

Plus, they can do it through subscription model, so for a monthly fee - you get to play whatever game you wish, for PC or PS, you dont need to buy it anymore. This is my dream since like forever...
 
Perhaps to avoid alienating the PS experience.
That and the fact that Valve are dominating too much in the PC world. It could work well as a complement to Steam rather than trying to compete.

I am not even into Steam so much, I just have like 12 Steam games or so, but it is built around the PC and it's high quality, certainly not easy to surpass it from the get go if you are a console company.
 
What if there is already PC and PS3 game version available. Gaikai was a PC rack service, with NVIDIA gpu if remember right. Would it be easier to mount PC rack cards instead of PS3 cards in a cloud storage. Highend GPU racks are expensive but lowend NVIDIAs enough to top 7y old console quality must be a super cheap.
 
Sony will be launching Playstation Now - Gaikai - this year. It will bring old PS, PS2 and PS3 games to almost any Sony product (PS4, mobile, Vita, tablets and TV).

I was thinking - why limit this service only to PS games? Why not go for all PC games and go after Valve's customers? Would that be not possible?

Gaikai already streamed "non PS games" so I think that it can be done.
Still EA, Ubi an the other publishers have their own digital delivery system and if cloud gaming takes root then they might just create their own cloud service/s instead than use PS Now.
This would mean that some games would remain exclusive to this or that other cloud service and not be playable through PS Now.
 
Gaikai already streamed "non PS games" so I think that it can be done.
Still EA, Ubi an the other publishers have their own digital delivery system and if cloud gaming takes root then they might just create their own cloud service/s instead than use PS Now.
This would mean that some games would remain exclusive to this or that other cloud service and not be playable through PS Now.

Sony should just encourage that and then offer Play Now as a cost effective infrastructure for them to plug into. Like Amazon do with affiliate schemes.
 
That and the fact that Valve are dominating too much in the PC world. It could work well as a complement to Steam rather than trying to compete.

I am not even into Steam so much, I just have like 12 Steam games or so, but it is built around the PC and it's high quality, certainly not easy to surpass it from the get go if you are a console company.

Sony will not compete with Valve "per se" - there will be a difference, since Valve sells games and Sony will be renting them.

I, for one, dont play on PC, and I guess there a quite a few good games that I probably miss. If I could rent then on PlayStation Now...
 
I don't personally think Sony is in a position to be "going after" anybody. Build your services up and make your own great service viable.

Besides, i think its going to be hard enough to even stay competitive with Valve's offerings, let alone trying to "beat them". Cause really, regardless of how much SCE has learned from PS3 in regards to reacting to trends, your not going to be able to win versus open source stuff.

I say that as a pure console gamer who's never played on PC and not in any malicious way, its just the truth. Sony, devs, and retailers won't be bundling like 5 games together for 15 bucks. That's just not happening. Also, devs aren't going to be supporting mods on consoles, that's also not happening. The advantages of the PC platform are the advantages of Valve, and Sony can't compete. Stick to what your good at and hopefully ride the waves.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if the 22nm Cell and perhaps 28nm RSX or single die altogether appears at around the time this service goes live. It should bring pretty good power savings to them and perhaps another PS3 revision/form factor?
 
I say that as a pure console gamer who's never played on PC and not in any malicious way, its just the truth. Sony, devs, and retailers won't be bundling like 5 games together for 15 bucks. That's just not happening.

I think this is the key point.

After all, I read lots of PC-centric forums still from back in the day when I was a PC gamer and buying new CPUs and GPUs and more RAM every 6 months or so, and they all said the One's original digital-only and DRM system was abhorrent to them.

When the question was posed: "How is this different than Steam?", it all came down to the same response - PRICE.

They're willing to pay for digital only copies of games that are DRM loaded as long as they are provided at HUGE (not slight, not minor, but significant) discounts.

In their minds it's one thing to buy a bunch of PC games off of Steam at a rate of 5 for $15. It's something else to get those same games, with the same DRM and licensing and usage requirements and restrictions at $60 each.

Because of that, I don't think Sony (or MS) has a chance in hell of competing or "going after" Valve and Steam.

Even the free games that are given away each month with PSN+ or Live Gold aren't enough to bridge that monetary gap.
 
Sony's digital pricing has been incredibly competitive for a while (The first season of Walking Dead was like $2 for PS+ member recently, less than it has ever been anywhere on PC) and PS+ is a better value than either Steam Sales or Humble Bundles offering 60+ games a year for less than $1 each. If you add up all the PS+ games just for January at the cheapest they have been on PC you'd have spent over $30 (not including the Vita only game), which is incidentally how much I spent on my most recent year of PS+. Amazon also sells PSN codes now and are already price matching competitor sales for them.

But all of that has little bearing on PS Now which is more akin to a streaming alternative like Netflix compared to buying digital movies from a service like iTunes which is the Steam model (frequent discounts notwithstanding). I don't know that I expect PS Now to offer "first run" games. Instead it will primarily be a game discovery service that offers access to a large selection of titles from the PlayStation back catalog. It will also offer many games that never made it to PC, and let you play them on many devices that don't run Steam at all. We don't know nearly enough to pass judgement at this point, of course, but I could see it being a super-compelling service at a reasonable price ($10-15/month) for a good catalog (several hundred titles).
 
Sony's digital pricing has been incredibly competitive for a while (The first season of Walking Dead was like $2 for PS+ member recently, less than it has ever been anywhere on PC) and PS+ is a better value than either Steam Sales or Humble Bundles offering 60+ games a year for less than $1 each. If you add up all the PS+ games just for January at the cheapest they have been on PC you'd have spent over $30 (not including the Vita only game), which is incidentally how much I spent on my most recent year of PS+. Amazon also sells PSN codes now and are already price matching competitor sales for them.

But all of that has little bearing on PS Now which is more akin to a streaming alternative like Netflix compared to buying digital movies from a service like iTunes which is the Steam model (frequent discounts notwithstanding). I don't know that I expect PS Now to offer "first run" games. Instead it will primarily be a game discovery service that offers access to a large selection of titles from the PlayStation back catalog. It will also offer many games that never made it to PC, and let you play them on many devices that don't run Steam at all. We don't know nearly enough to pass judgement at this point, of course, but I could see it being a super-compelling service at a reasonable price ($10-15/month) for a good catalog (several hundred titles).

I agree the service has lots of potential it really comes down to how much will Playstation now cost and if tablet and smart phone users will be willing to pay the monthly fees associated with accessing these games. Sony clearly has a decent library of games to offer gamers but we just don't know how much if anything people will be willing to pay to access it.
 
Playstation Now is completely different from Steam.

Steam is based on the old "Pay for Game" concept.

Playstation Now will be pioneering the new concept "Pay for Play". I have been advocating this business model since almost 6 years now, it will finally be here.

What I would like to see from Playstation Now is a step even further ahead - where I can rent/play PS4 games, not by streaming them, but by installing and playing the game locally (the actual piece of soft/game should be made available by Sony for free (on bittorrent for ex.), but will only work in conjunction with the Playstation Now subscription (always online).

If they make this 20-25$/month - i'm sold.
 
Playstation Now is completely different from Steam.

Steam is based on the old "Pay for Game" concept.

Playstation Now will be pioneering the new concept "Pay for Play". I have been advocating this business model since almost 6 years now, it will finally be here.

Then I am confused about your original statement when you opened this thread:

I was thinking - why limit this service only to PS games? Why not go for all PC games and go after Valve's customers? Would that be not possible?

I gave you the reasons why not. Because Steam customers want to own their games, and because they are digital copies, they want to own them at a significantly lower price than having a physical copy.

What you are proposing now is something even further from where even the devoted Steam fans are willing to go. You want on-demand rentals of every game, not just Sony games, to be available.

The price for that would have to be so low for people to consider it that it wouldn't make sense for the developers to do so.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what it is you'd like to see happen here?
 
As long as PS Now only remains an option, i'm cool with it. AN OPTION. As people have shown last year, we don't like options being taken away.

As long as i can still buy retail games and download games and keep them as i've always done, i have no issue with Sony providing further options to consumers. But like with Microsoft, when your try and turn your consumer base into a bunch of fools who don't know the difference between a product you own and service that you can only use when the publisher says you can, that's when i take issue.

I want to own what i buy, when i want to own it. If i just want to see a movie once, i'll use netflix. If i want to keep a movie, i'll buy it on DVD/Bluray. The thought of a game being held up by strings at the behest of the publisher disgusts me, hence my aversion to all of these online only multiplayer centric games recently.
 
Considering how shitty the average American broadband connection is, and how it buckles under a simple non-latency sensitive Netflix stream, I'm not seeing PlayStation Now as the panacea some people think it to be.

Show me a 100+ mi demo during peak Internet traffic hours on a 6Mb/sec DSL connection (average connection is 4Mb/sec in the US, and PSNow requires 5Mb/sec) while someone else on your home WiFI network watches a Netflix stream and *then* I will be impressed. Otherwise, I expect this to go like the launch of World of Warcraft back in 2004: everyone's extremely excited, then the servers crash and burn for several months. :rolleyes:
 
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