Michael Pachter has been one of the most vocal critics of PlayStation Now and has claimed that it won’t be easy get publishers to put their stuff on there and offer it for a lower price than they would make at retail. In our conversation with Shadowrun Returns developer Jordan Weisman, we asked whether Sony will succeed in making it a worthy venture and whether we’ll eventually see a platform-free experience where you can play any PlayStation game on any platform.
“It’s a Netflix solution, right? Netflix is a great consumer experience, no question about it and their stock has responded in accordance with how good of a consumer experience it is. As a content creator, is that a great business model? It’s a challenging one. Instead of selling a movie to a consumer for thirty bucks, now I’m getting a very small fraction of a pretty small subscription price based upon the viewership,” Jordan said to GamingBolt.
“It is a challenging model for content creators, and we’re seeing that whether it’s the streaming music services – you’ve heard a lot of music artists complaining that their royalty flow from something like Pandora is pitifully low – and that same circumstance is a identical model that is being discussed here, so in the long run, does it actually generate enough money to make it worthwhile to create content? There’s going to have to be some innovation in those models to make it financially interesting.”
PS Now is expected to launch later this year for the PlayStation 4. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.