The price of Sony’s PlayStation Now game streaming service is coming down, way down. In fact, depending on the region you’re in and the length of time you’re paying for, it’s coming down by 50%!
In the UK, it’s not quite hitting that mark, but a single month is dropping from £12.99 to £8.99, a 31% drop, and a full year is now just £49.99 instead of £84.99, a 41% drop. The EU is on the same lines, falling 33% from €14.99 to €9.99 for a month, and 40% from €99.99 to €59.99.
So where does get the magic 50% reduction? The US! There it’s now $9.99 per month, down from $19.99. And Japan! where it’s actually 53% off, now sitting at ¥1,180 for a month instead of ¥2,500.
Here’s the new price breakdown, with a new three month quarterly option in Europe:
- UK: £8.99 – monthly / £22.99 – quarterly / £49.99 – yearly (from 12.99 / (N/A) / 84.99)
- EU: €9.99 – monthly / €24.99 – quarterly / €59.99 – yearly (from 14.99/ (N/A)/ 99.99)
- US: $9.99 – monthly / $24.99 – quarterly / $59.99 – yearly (from 19.99/ 44.99/ 99.99)
- JP: ¥1,180 – monthly / ¥2,980 – quarterly / ¥6,980 – yearly (from 2,500 / 5,900/ (N/A))
Sony are also throwing a bunch of huge games into the already bursting 700 game catalogue available to subscribers. God of War (2018), Grand Theft Auto V, inFamous Second Son and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End will be available from today until 2nd January 2020, available to stream to PS4 and Windows PC, or download to PS4 – a feature added a year ago. Sony will be cycling in games on a monthly period.
The move makes PlayStation Now’s pricing much more competitive with Microsoft’s rival service, Xbox Game Pass, which comes in at £7.99 per month and has no long-term subscription price reductions. Yearlong subscriptions and the larger library of games could make PlayStation Now more attractive in the long run, but Microsoft also offer Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which expands the subscription to include PC games and an Xbox Live Gold subscription for £10.99 per month. Sony are not offering a combined Now and Plus subscription at this point in time.
It also puts Sony on a footing to compete with the upcoming Google Stadia streaming service, matching their £8.99 monthly price, but being able to boast a much broader library of games to play that spans multiple generations. That said, Google’s vision stretches far beyond your traditional gaming locales, with the company hoping to make streamed gaming available to practically any screen that can display an image and has a Wi-Fi connection. PlayStation Now is only available on PS4 and PC, having phased out support for Sony TVs, Blu-ray players, PS3 and PS Vita back in 2017.
Source: press release
MrYd
Just 4 games this month then? And they’ll vanish after 3 months? Or is that in addition to whatever else they put on more permanently? Could we really be getting half the amount of games for half the price? I guess we find out whenever they get around to updating everything. (Unusually late this month)
On the other hand, £4.17 a month if you pay for a year is a bit of a bargain.
MrYd
Ah, they’ve just answered some questions in a 2nd blog post…
https://blog.eu.playstation.com/2019/10/01/playstation-now-is-changing-heres-everything-you-need-to-know/
The limited time games are in addition to everything else.