Starting from today, Sony is permanently slashing the price of Playstation Now, their cloud and gaming subscription service.
Dropping from £12.99 a month to £8.99, or from £85 a year to £50 if you choose to buy the cheapest option, the service is now much more competitively priced against Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription – though still £1 a month more expensive.
Originally launching as a cloud streaming service only, PS Now eventually included the ability to download PS4 titles to play locally from your own machine. This initially raised the value of the subscription by 100%, because the cloud streaming service was pitifully useless, but Game Pass has increasingly put PS Now’s library to shame since.
Fortunately, for those jumping in at the new lower cost, they’ll be able to download and play 4 major AAA games being added for a temporary period of the next three months, until the 2nd January 2020. While this is a frustratingly short timeframe, Sony promises to add more of its most popular games to the library on a rotating basis month by month.
Those four games are: 2018’s God of War; Grand Theft Auto V; inFamous Second Son and Uncharted 4.
Whether any of these changes will really challenge Game Pass is a pretty open ended question. It certainly brings it more in line with Microsoft’s offering, but there’s really no question that Game Pass still offers much more value overall. With Game Pass likely to be of huge significance in the release of the next Xbox, Scarlett, next year, it is at least important for Sony to begin reacting to it if it doesn’t want to be completely left behind with the PS5.
A new TV ad accompanies the changes, which you can view below.
