The open beta for PlayStation Now, Sony’s new game streaming service, is now officially underway in the US and includes some Sega and Atlus games. Sega have three games available at the moment namely Sonic CD, Crazy Taxi and Alpha Protocol, while Atlus is offering people access to Catherine, their PS3 puzzle/adventure/horror game which they first released back in 2011. At one point Sega’s NiGHTS into Dreams was also available for the service, but right now it’s not part of the 100+ games available for the beta. Unfortunately that means Valkyria Chroncicles and the Yakuza games are also not available at the moment, something we hope will change in the future. It’s interesting to note that Alpha Protocol, unlike the other two games, is in fact not available as a digital download on PSN on the PS3. This means we may very well see Valkyria Chronicles and the Yakuza games become available on PlayStation Now as well, seeing how those aren’t available digitally either.
For now though, the service is getting criticized heavily for it’s pricing model, which many feel is simply too costly for users at the moment. For some games players are asked to pay $4.99 to play the game for 4 hours. Hardly a reasonable deal, and while Sony is responding to feedback and promised to lower some of the prices and include a subscription model, it’s clear that Sony is going to have to work on having the service co-exist with PlayStation Network and PlayStation Plus subscription. Right now, the latter is simply offering far better value for money. There’s also the fact that, when you can simply go and buy the actual game for a price lower than it costs to rent the game on PlayStation Now, Sony will have a hard time convincing anyone to spend their money on the service. The full list of game that are available in the beta can be found in this post on NeoGAF. Below you can watch Sony’s announcement trailer for PlayStation Now.
