With the PlayStation Now PS4 open beta set to begin on July 31 in the United States and Canada, Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida revealed to Games Industry that they’ll continue calling it an open beta after July, because “we expect it to keep changing in many ways.”
One of the ways PlayStation Now will likely change throughout the beta is in terms of pricing and the pricing model. Although Shuhei said “we don’t know yet” when it comes to doing a Netflix-style subscription for PlayStation Now, he did add, “We have been saying that we’re looking at doing a subscription model, in addition to rental. Or vice versa: rental in addition to subscription.”
Expected to have over 100 PS3 games available when the open beta begins, Shuhei mentioned that their vision is to have thousands of games on PlayStation Now in the future:
We have the vision of bringing hundreds and thousands of PlayStation games to every screen. That’s the vision, but we’re taking one step at a time. There’s investment in the server farm, the tech, internet latency and bandwidth. We have to start from somewhere.
When you do start the PlayStation Now open beta, Shuhei admits that “wi-fi is a challenge. Typically, we recommend 5Mbps for 720p quality. That’s a challenge, especially in some markets. But we also view it as a matter of time, because the infrastructure just gets better and better.”
