Yesterday Sony made the beta for their PS Now service live, and the reaction to the pricing offered by the platform holder has left some people with mixed feelings. For a start, there's no subscription service, instead people will be able rent one of around 100 featured games for a limited period of time. But for how long and how much will it cost? Well, that's where it starts to get complicated.
For example, you can rent some games for as little as four hours, but to do so will cost you between $3 and $5 dollars. That's a little too much if you ask us, and why anyone would pay such a premium price for such a short period of time is beyond us.
The situation gets a little bit better when the length of the rental is increased to seven days, with games priced between $4 and $15 dollars. Obviously the $15 pricing isn't as inviting as $4 dollars, but at least there's more choice. Longer rentals obviously cost even more, and when you're talking about paying $30 to rent a game for a month (or longer - 90 days is the longest period available), you might as well buy it for the same price, that way there's no pressure to finish it in the allotted time.
This pricing comes hot on the heels of Sony suggesting that the similar service offered by EA is not "good value" (more on that here). While EA's offering is subscription-based rather than a streaming service, there are parallels that can be drawn, with both companies exploring different ways of engaging gamers using digital instead of the more traditional retail route.
However, we're not getting too worried yet, and this is all fairly irrelevant at this stage as far as we're concerned, given that PS Now isn't likely to land in Europe anytime soon. When it is, there's probably going to be some adjustment to the pricing as it is now (you can see a full list of games and price over on IGN), so we'll reserve judgement on that for when the service arrives on these shores.