PlayStation Now

» see playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstationnow as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ps now never reached turkey. the official region list ran across north america, the uk, japan, and a sixteen-country slice of western europe, with turkey sitting outside the licensing perimeter from the 2014 launch to the 2022 shutdown. by the time playstation plus premium replaced it, the cloud-gaming category had moved on without ever shipping to my account. i could read about it. i could not log into it.

anyway, sony bought gaikai in july 2012 for about 380 million dollars, mainly for the cloud-streaming tech david perry's team had been quietly building. ps now was the product that came out of that purchase. the closed beta opened in north america on 28 january '14, the public launch followed that summer on ps4 and select smart tvs. by 2015 it was on ps3 and pc, by 2017 it had reached japan, by 2019 the price had dropped to ten dollars a month, and sony was leaning on it as the answer to xbox game pass.

the hardware story was the interesting part. sony's engineers had to figure out how to run ps3 games on cloud servers, because the cell processor was the kind of weird that x86 emulation could not handle in real time. the answer was to bond eight actual ps3 motherboards into a single server rack chassis and run the games on the real silicon, streamed out as h.264 video over the network. ps4 games ran on more conventional sony cloud hardware. ps2 was emulated on top of that. the whole thing was an architecture that nobody else was going to build because nobody else had a warehouse of ps3 boards to bond.

sony reorganized the subscription stack in march '22. ps plus split into three tiers (essential at the bottom, premium at the top), with the premium tier folding in everything ps now used to do, plus a classics library going back to ps1. the new plus launched on 23 may '22 across asia first, then north america on 13 june, then europe on 22 june. ps now disappeared as a standalone product across the same window, the back catalog merged into the premium tier without a price hike for existing subscribers.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the streaming actually worked ~

the cloud rack was the secret. sony engineers had a presentation at game developers conference 2014 where they walked through the modified ps3 server design, eight boards on a custom backplane with shared power and shared network. each board ran one player's game at a time. the video output was captured off the hdmi pipeline, h.264-encoded on a small companion asic, then streamed to the player's ps4 over a low-latency video channel. input went the other way.

the latency was the whole problem. cloud gaming feels broken when the round-trip is over 60 milliseconds and feels acceptable when it stays under 40. sony's data centers were placed close enough to the major north american cities to make ps now playable for slow-paced games, but action games suffered. by 2017 the service had a reputation for being fine for rpgs and bad for fighting games. that reputation held until the end.

~ what it became ~

ps now did not really die. it became the premium tier of playstation plus, with a much larger library bolted on. the cloud servers presumably still run on the same data center hardware, the streaming pipeline still uses the same gaikai-descended tech, the subscriber base mostly moved over without protest because the price stayed flat at launch. the brand died, the product continued. the move was a renaming and a bundling, not a shutdown.

the larger pattern is that cloud gaming as a 2014-pitch standalone product never built a market that could pay its own server costs. google stadia died in january '23 for the same reason. onlive died for the same reason in 2015. ps now was the only one that survived by being absorbed into a larger subscription that did not have to justify the cloud cost on its own.

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