If you thought that Sony’s PlayStation Now service sounded too good to be true, you wouldn’t be the only one. Plenty of us are very skeptical after OnLive tried and failed to provide real-time game streaming without the need for downloads a few years ago, but Sony is still convinced it can pull off the improbable. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter, on the other hand, is not.
“PlayStation Now is a joke,” said Pachter in the March issue of Game Informer magazine. “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.”
Although Pachter has a point, the draw of the service for many is the concept of universal backwards compatibility. Having access to brand new retails titles over a subscription streaming service is something many developers and publishers would likely be averse to, but making a steady profit off of games that aren’t offered at full price on store shelves could make a dent in the difficult-to-manage used games market.
If partnering with Sony enables game studios to start making money on titles that were failing to generate new revenue, it might also convince them to put newer titles on the service as well. We’ll know later this year when PlayStation Now goes live to the public.
