14 DAY TRIAL // Well, it was about time Sony did something utterly stupid with the PlayStation 4. The PlayStation Now beta is now live, letting people out in the wild see that the company wants to milk them dry, to which, of course, they take offense.
The service allows gamers to stream gameplay of various PlayStation 3 games on their next-gen systems, with plans to expand to a larger lineup of compatible devices, in a sort of rental regime that enables them to play games for four hours, a week, a month or three months.
Sony's pricing for its streaming service is nothing short of ridiculous, with many games costing more to rent for a month than they would if you bought them in full, and the community is flabbergasted that the company would price the rentals so steep.
Sure, there are many great PlayStation 3 games, and many users would love to be able to relive cherished moments or still play their favorite PS3 titles after upgrading to the PlayStation 4, and this attempt to provide some sort of backward compatibility is a great initiative, if only the crazy numbers on the price tags didn't make your head hurt.
The service currently offers over 100 games for streaming on the PlayStation 4, and renting the games still costs more than buying them used ever would.
PlayStation Now Senior Director Jack Buser has confirmed the company's plans to explore a subscription-based model, and has also mentioned that Sony intends to add cheaper titles to the service, in order to offer a wider range of price points to choose from, but it still feels like a failed experiment to see how little self-respect people have.
It's incredible that, in this day and age, after so many years of leading the video game market, the level of incompetence in such a big corporation's upper management is still sky-high.
It feels as if they're trying to see how stupid their audience is, and how much money they can milk out of people with more income than common sense, and they're not even sorry about it.
It's like someone asking $100 / €75 for a loaf of bread, and upon seeing your expression, going "sorry, heh, better now, chief?" and showing you that it was a hundred times cheaper all along, and they were just hoping that you were a spineless chump.
Shady dealings, and also the main reason I don't buy overpriced and useless natural diamonds or overpriced and soulless modern art pieces from deconstructivist hacks who don't ever bother to refine whatever talent they might have.
Netflix, Amazon Prime and many other such services offer quality content with monthly subscriptions offering unlimited access to everything, and it's the kind of model that people seem to want.
For crying out loud, even Electronic Arts, a company notorious for mistreating its employees and being generally a money-grubbing entity that has little respect for people, their feelings and whatever IP it needs to butcher in order to make a quick buck, realized that monthly subs for a breadth of content was the way to go.
OnLive has been providing a similar service for quite some time, and it's struggling to get its foot in the door, and it's offering the option to stream the games to Android, Mac, PC and TV. It would most likely also work with PlayStation systems, but Sony is rubbing its hands too hard while ogling the pile of money it's expecting to make to allow better competition to use its platforms to make an honest dollar.
Of course, I would have paid a fortune for a 486 laptop back in '92, back then I would have just puffed my chest, grabbed my suspenders and felt like my plaid shirt was a shining beacon in this vast ocean of ignorance that is desktop computing.
But now I can play Rift, League of Legends, Path of Exile and many, many others completely free, so what on Earth is Sony thinking with these ridiculous prices? Sure, you can end up paying much more for all of these games than you would have if you just bought them in the first place.
But that's because you want to support the companies that provide you with such quality entertainment, not because you want to appease some idol of greed, with dollar signs for eyes, like Scrooge McDuck had in the old Duck Tales cartoons.
Microsoft tried to pull something like this with the Xbox One, and the PR fallout caused Sony to change its PS4 introductory speech at E3. It's still baffling to know that people with so much influence, experience and resources are as inane as random comment section fanboys are when it comes to formulating the tenets of their business.
Remember when Ubisoft said that 95 percent of their customers were pirating their PC games, created an impossible DRM, smugly stated that it was working just as intended and that piracy had been severely reduced, then went back and said that they didn't really care about PC because everyone pirated their work anyway?
What I'm trying to say is stop supporting companies that clearly don't care about you and that only want to please you as a last resort, when you vote with your wallet, or rather, after you do that, second-guessing themselves and going against their word.
It's not so bad not to have a console, you get the extra money you spend on a top-end PC (which is not that much if you don't go crazy) back over time, through the abundance of sales on Steam and other outlets and the lower price point of PC games.
Plus, you can finally take a leap of fate and learn how to stick an HDMI cable into your computer and enjoy any game on a big-screen TV, with a controller in hand, from the comfort of your couch, just like you would on consoles, with the added benefit of being able to file your tax return from your gaming machine.