Should “PlayStation Now” Be Part Of “PlayStation Plus?”.

PlayStation Plus has reached an inevitable impasse. Having introduced the mandatory subscription service to the PS4, if you wanted to play online games that is, Sony needed to justify the additional monthly tariff that consumers like me had no prior use for. An annual £40 surplus was a considerable investment, one that I initially felt was validated. Providing a select range of free games for the PS4, PS3 and Vita every month. Ensuring a more secure online network, an essential resource considering PlayStation’s infamous fallibility in this area. The capacity to save game data onto the cloud. All of this functionality was a clear and definitive incentive, albeit one passively enforced by Sony. But a lot has changed since then, most notably the price of subscription.

Being the purported “Sony Pony” that I am, with my previous statements advocating the online service that only further reinforces that sentiment, it can be rather difficult to accept failure in certain area’s. But I’m not so totally complicit with my allegiance that I can’t call bull when I smell it. And Sony’s currently inflated pricing of PlayStation Plus has a distinctly pungent aroma of a recently destroyed China shop. By increasing the price of admission you’d expect to be getting more for your money. In fact your getting less! Fewer games are now available monthly, with Sony depriving users of the PS3 and Vita titles. But neglecting to subsidise those loses by increasing the number of PS4 titles. Increasing the price by 25% isn’t so bad in and of itself, but offering less of a comprehensive service is! With only 2 free games being made available every month, with arguably only one of those being a recognised, critical title that most gamers have probably already purchased, PS Plus is just a antiquated reason to charge gamers to access online content. The only real solution to rectify this brazen manipulation of its fans is to incorporate PS Now into the price.

Comprising these two separate features into one comprehensive utility is really the only way Sony can justify the escalated cost, without further propegating the perception that Sony are simply greedy (like any corporation I guess). Its a mutually beneficial integration, one that at the very least makes the excessive price more alluring. PS Now as a separate entity simply isn’t viable. Its a service that really only holds a peripheral interest to me, as streaming games isn’t really practical considering the snail powered WiFi I have at my disposal. Though it’s possible to download games, it still doesn’t incentivize me enough to have it separately from PS Plus. But intergrated with it, to me at least is a much more feasible alternative.

With the announcement of the PS5, tentatively confirmed for late next year, PS Now should be a compulsory integration with PS Plus. This could be the perfect accompaniment. Permitting access to a wide range catalogue of iconic PlayStation games on a new generation of consoles. It’s the ultimate backwards compatibility. Something that makes PlayStation Plus a more inviting prospect.

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Should PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now merge? Would you use PS Now if it were intergrated with PS Plus. Let me know in the comments below. Cheers.

The Elder Scrolls Online And The Moaning Imperialist. Part 1

We all require subscriptions occasional and I’m not referring to the medicinal kind. Whether its contract renewal on your mobile phone or an extension on a specific publication, they are conventions entered in at your own discretion that allows your life to function with permissive continuity, thereby negating the regularity to commit to the pedantic rituals. But in the advent to Sony’s contentious decision to infer premium charges for customers to access specific on-line content, gaming now appears to be consorted by additional, furtive costs. Bethesda’s gallant progression into the comprehensive MMO specificity that is preparing to ejaculate across the world like a secretion of troll seaman, is being introduced at an inflated, statutory price of £8.99! That’s the tentative estimation placed on a unified subscription to traverse the fictionalised continent of Tamriel and its subsidiary principalities, for a month?! Now I’ll concede that I display a penitent to bemoan a 1 pence tax inflation on a pint of milk; retaining an accusatory tone of contempt for such tyrannous expansion at some enigmatic adversary, fabricated to ease my mediated derision and eliciting inevitable glances of perturbation from fellow customers and instinctive deviation from my ambient vicinity. But to implement such an excessive charge mitigates the intended presumption of collating the Elder Scrolls frenetic adherents, into one mailable extremity and actively encourages an episodic division between the affluent and the indigent.

“Can any game justify over £100 per annum?”

I’m perhaps being a little myopic in my aggregation of the subscription service, and I certainly don’t retain an antagonized perception that this is some nefarious scheme on Bethesda’s behalf to purloin sustaining profits from suggestible dolts, like the school bully that reprimands you for your less than imposing athleticism or admonishing you for your allocated change, by inverting you by your legs and shaking you until every last coin has been extruded. And when you consider the litany of issues that severely afflicted GTA V’s belligerent initialisation with such infinite severity, as well as EA’s petulant irritation to neglect their deficient systems and to propose any permanent solutions to a server that goes down with more determinate regularity than Luis Suarez. Free to Play titles are certainly latent in its angelic deferential and establishing such cursory parameters will bestow intrinsic continuity necessary for optimum immersion, simply by maintaining a visibly enveloping architecture for its artificial, peripheral continent as well as its more intricate mechanics, but such a garnished valuation means that The Elder Scrolls Online will divert into a much more extortionate investment. Casual gamers will become reticent in acquiring a game without the penitent collateral or subsidised allotment to indulge in its many intricacies, with no tangible justification for the estimation. Perhaps PC gamers feel that its pricing is regimented estimation, easily comparable to other MMO’s and worthy of its enthralling parable. But–and I’ve used that word lavishly–it’s unlikely that some console gamers will share that affinity.

£8.99 is a fair, reflective negation if I was funding treatment for some impoverished child suffering with a litany of viral diseases or deformities, but premium allocation to a game is a budgetary expenditure I can ill afford. Unless Bethesda retract or reduce these significant numerical concussions registered with such brazen impunity, then I will remain ambivalent in its opulent presence, beside other numerable spectators. Though curiously, ESO price isn’t my primary concern…….

Will you be purchasing The Elder Scrolls?

Is DLC A Rip-off?