Those of you looking for another possible way to play original Playstation games on any of your Sony devices, such as PS3, PS4, or the PS Vita, and even your smartphones, tablets, and Sony Bravia TVs, will soon have the ability to do so through a new game streaming service that will be offered by Sony itself called Playstation Now. Playstation Now comes by way of the streaming service called Gaikai which Sony acquired last year, and will offer gamers a way to stream a vast library of Playstation games onto multiple devices at the same time, anyhwere, but not without a cost. On top of(or so it seems) the Playstation+ subscription that users already pay for, it seems that if you want to stream a game to any of the supported devices you will actually have to rent the game that you want to play or pay another sub fee for it. Sony was light on the details regarding the sub fees for games, but perhaps some more information will trickle out as CES continues.
There are some benefits however to having these rental and sub fees added in which is the support of PSN like features such as multiplayer, trophies(achievements), messages to your friends, and online capabilities. Still even with those features it kind of sours the whole experience. What might have been a better idea is to wrap this whole entire service into the Playstation+ system setup, giving subscribers who already pay for that particular service the capability to get this one for free, and offer a separate fee based setup of rentals and subscriptions to users who don’t have Playstation+, as double charging for something that users can just find a roundabout way of getting for free seems kind of silly to us.
Sony says that the Playstation Now service is slated for a late January beta run on the PS3 system, and will then spread out to the other supported systems and devices over time. Although, there was no mention of a time frame for when the other supported devices will be able to take advantage of Playstation Now. It’s great to see Sony offering gamers the ability to snag a piece of nostalgia by letting them play Playstation one games across multiple devices, but should you not care about any of the online PSN type features, there’s little to sway users from just sidestepping Playstation Now altogether and playing their favorite PS1 games for free through emulators, which can also be used anywhere, anytime. Lets us know what you think about Playstation Now in the comments.