Patcher is about to feel the wrath. He says PlayStation Now is a "joke" and has "no prayer of working," in the latest issue of Game Informer. I hope he has his flame suit on.....
via Game Informer/Video Gamer
"PlayStation Now is a joke," he said in the latest issue of Game Informer. "There is no publisher that is going to license content that's less than two-years old because they would be concerned that they can't sell as many copies if they make it available for subscription or rental.
"This has no prayer of working. None."
Funny... I agree with Pachter's conclusion (it's a joke, and it has no prayer of working) - but my reasoning is completely different.
For PlayStation NOW to work, we need to make *serious* gains in networking infrastructure, with *massive* pipes and significantly improved round-trip latency... not to mention, close datacenters for all customers... but the truth is, Sony doesn't have the financial prowess to build out such datacenters... current pipes are too small, and current networking traffic to even close/near-by datacenters is still too latent. What Sony demoed is a far cry from how it'll work in the real-world.
...but Pachter's right. Why license new games to be played on this service, when you can get away with charging $60 for it at retail or in the marketplace? Also, Do you really want a user's impression of your game damaged by significant and noticeable lag? Not to mention, Sony would have to invest a crazy amount in cloud GPU's to get anything remotely 'current gen' running in the cloud at scale - so yeah - Sony's got the right idea (long term), and playing games as a service is certainly coming... but PlayStation Now won't be it. Sony's pulling a Sega... the Dreamcast had a modem built in, and true online MP... but it was just a few years too soon, and it wasn't quite built properly...
So yeah, there are now two very legitimate reasons to be skeptical of PlayStation Now; the technical problems which Sony hasn't solved, and the business equation doesn't make sense for anything current.
Maybe if PlayStation Now can solve the technical problems, and if people actually want to use it to play a bunch of last gen games, then they might be able to do something... but I think for cloud games as a service to succeed, you need to build something which SURPASSES today's graphical capabilities on local consoles... you need something which is BETTER than what can be done in-house on a console... and it needs to have no perceivable lag... and it needs to have no intrusive artifacting from compression with compression levels at Blu-ray quality... get that trifecta in place, and you might have something... (of course, you'd still need to ensure it's affordable too)... but as currently proposed, PlayStation Now will miss the mark, and I can't imagine it'll be successful.
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