Pachter is about to feel the wrath. He says PlayStation Now is a "joke."

Plainview said:
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."​
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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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TOPDAWG said:
What did Sony pay for the company who had this streaming serve anyway?
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This is just my personal speculation, but I'd imagine it had to do with staying competitive. I believe Sony bent over backwards to figure out what MS was doing, and wanted to ensure they pretty much matched Microsoft's game offering features one-for-one. Sony knew we'd have a huge investment in cloud services, and one of the most interesting 'cloud features' in recent history with regards to games is to run them entirely in the cloud, as a service, and have users connect to that service. Perhaps Sony assumed that's the direction we were going, and they knew they'd need to compete there.

In the not-so-distant future, it very well may be possible to run games in the cloud which look better than anything that current console hardware can render, and do so with no perceivable lag (given a good enough connection), with compression low-enough so that there's no discernable compression artifacts.

If that existed, then local hardware power becomes virtually irrelevant. Consoles could literally be free with the purchase of a subscription. You'd literally be playing the exact experience, whether on a phone, a tablet, an HDTV, a monitor, etc... now, of course, that's not something that's possible today at any sort of reasonable price and with any sort of reasonable connection speed... but it's possible.
 
Flynn said:
This is just my personal speculation, but I'd imagine it had to do with staying competitive. I believe Sony bent over backwards to figure out what MS was doing, and wanted to ensure they pretty much matched Microsoft's game offering features one-for-one. Sony knew we'd have a huge investment in cloud services, and one of the most interesting 'cloud features' in recent history with regards to games is to run them entirely in the cloud, as a service, and have users connect to that service. Perhaps Sony assumed that's the direction we were going, and they knew they'd need to compete there.

In the not-so-distant future, it very well may be possible to run games in the cloud which look better than anything that current console hardware can render, and do so with no perceivable lag (given a good enough connection), with compression low-enough so that there's no discernable compression artifacts.

If that existed, then local hardware power becomes virtually irrelevant. Consoles could literally be free with the purchase of a subscription. You'd literally be playing the exact experience, whether on a phone, a tablet, an HDTV, a monitor, etc... now, of course, that's not something that's possible today at any sort of reasonable price and with any sort of reasonable connection speed... but it's possible.
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Yeah but I forget what Sony paid I think it was 500 million if I remember right. They better hope NOW does ok cause damn with the buy itself upgrading the tech servers and staff they better hope to get a return on that investment.
 
PS+ is $50 and you get free games every month. Even assuming PS Now has the capability of streaming games nice and smooth, depending on the price and games available will make it succeed or fail.

In the early part, they said old games would be available first. How many people are going to pay on top of their PS+ fee let's say $10/mth more to play old PS2 and PS3 games? Who knows. Maybe it's $5/mth. Maybe $15/mth.

I don't think Onlive did that great, so I don't see how PS Now will especially if it's old games.

Like Pacther said, (and just like GFG and PS+), there's going to be no recent games offered. They will all be old games.
 
Intellivision said:
PS+ is $50 and you get free games every month. Even assuming PS Now has the capability of streaming games nice and smooth, depending on the price and games available will make it succeed or fail.

In the early part, they said old games would be available first. How many people are going to pay on top of their PS+ fee let's say $10/mth more to play old PS2 and PS3 games? Who knows. Maybe it's $5/mth. Maybe $15/mth.

I don't think Onlive did that great, so I don't see how PS Now will especially if it's old games.

Like Pacther said, (and just like GFG and PS+), there's going to be no recent games offered. They will all be old games.
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Onlive was doomed cause the prices where f***ing insane high as compared to steam. I mean hell with steam no point in having to stream a game on the PC just buy it cheap and download the f***er. Onlive also had major issues getting it's hardware out or being built into other hardware. Now has the PS3 and PS4 it can run on that will be a huge huge step up from onlive.

Talking about online WTF happened to the games people did buy on there when they went bust? did they just lose all their s***?
 
Flynn said:
This is just my personal speculation, but I'd imagine it had to do with staying competitive. I believe Sony bent over backwards to figure out what MS was doing, and wanted to ensure they pretty much matched Microsoft's game offering features one-for-one. Sony knew we'd have a huge investment in cloud services, and one of the most interesting 'cloud features' in recent history with regards to games is to run them entirely in the cloud, as a service, and have users connect to that service. Perhaps Sony assumed that's the direction we were going, and they knew they'd need to compete there.

In the not-so-distant future, it very well may be possible to run games in the cloud which look better than anything that current console hardware can render, and do so with no perceivable lag (given a good enough connection), with compression low-enough so that there's no discernable compression artifacts.

If that existed, then local hardware power becomes virtually irrelevant. Consoles could literally be free with the purchase of a subscription. You'd literally be playing the exact experience, whether on a phone, a tablet, an HDTV, a monitor, etc... now, of course, that's not something that's possible today at any sort of reasonable price and with any sort of reasonable connection speed... but it's possible.
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That's Jetson s*** man.
 
Forgot where I was reading, but one of the bigger news outlets (maybe Game Informer) said they have yet to use PS Now in real world performance.

When they got to test it out during an event all the servers were close to the event.
 
That's pretty much how all of those kinds of things are shown off to the press, until they are up and running and people can try them from their homes/businesses it's always going to be a controlled environment.
 
mb1025 said:
Forgot where I was reading, but one of the bigger news outlets (maybe Game Informer) said they have yet to use PS Now in real world performance.

When they got to test it out during an event all the servers were close to the event.
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That's right, the servers were right down the hall. It is only with the beta, going on soon (?), that we'll actually see how it performs under more or less "real world" conditions.
 
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