Sony has announced that the company’s game streaming service PlayStation Now is receiving the new option of downloading games locally on the PS4 console. This way, games played through the service will no longer require being streamed online, requiring extensive bandwidth. Users will still have the option to stream their games.
The news was posted on the PlayStation Blog, where Brian Dunn, Senior Marketing Manager at PlayStation Now, announced the brand-new method of playing games offline via PlayStation Now. Starting today, subscribers to PlayStation Now service will get the opportunity to choose between full streaming or local downloads. All PS4 and PS2 titles currently available on PlayStation Now will be downloadable for PS4 systems. PlayStation 3 games are still confined to streaming-only as the technological architecture of the PS4 simply isn’t designed to play PS3 games.
PlayStation Now adding this new feature for its users might not sound very important but this is in fact a very big deal. After all, Sony was lagging behind their most direct competitor in offering a game subscription. The Xbox Game Pass has been giving gamers on Microsoft’s console a great value since last year. The game subscription some are calling Netflix for Games took off on the Xbox.
With today’s change to PlayStation Now, Sony is inching towards a new future for gaming, as it looks like game subscriptions will only become more important for future game consoles. With the ever-improving broadband infrastructure, the next generation of consoles look like to put an unprecedented emphasis of game streaming and game subscriptions.
There’s a lot more interest in this business model than just Microsoft and Sony however. Electronic Arts, one of the biggest game publishers in the world, started their very own game subscription services wiith Origin Access and EA Access on the Xbox One and PC before anyone else. Tech giant Google is also rumouredly planning on entering the gaming industry with a console entirely working via game streaming. Seeing the company’s interest in subcription models like they did with Youtube Red, it’s not that far off to expect Google to also introduce their own game subscription service.
