Exactly.
That Sony and their services continue to get dismissed is amazing.
I think it's just recency bias. Microsoft made announcements recently along the lines of future intentions to have 'everything, everywhere'.
Sony made announcements of the same intentions...5 years ago.
Microsoft's announcements are more recent in the memory but they're no more ambitious than Sony's stated goals.
Yes, Sony's implementation has room for improvement...but Microsoft's implementation needs to begin in the first place. And it's too easy to fall into the trap of idealising something that does not yet exist in the market vs something that has been iterated upon in the open for years, and continues to be iterated upon.
As for the promise of 'first party games day and date' on Gamepass - which seems to be the major buzz point for people over the PSNow model - and whether sony would match that, or risk disruption to their business... I don't think they
have to match that promise in order to get a huge headstart on catalog appeal in their subscription service going into the next generation. If Sony debuts a backward compatible PS5, and puts most or all of their first party PS4 catalog on PSNow, they'll have a huge headstart on those fronts in the early years of the generation. It'll take a long period of very high quality 'day and date' first party releases on Gamepass to catch up to what Sony could do overnight with PSNow, IMO, and by the time they did, who knows what the PS5 content offering on the service will look like. Now whether Sony will or not, I don't know, but I rarely see much analysis of the strengths Sony
could bring to bear in this discussion without necessarily disrupting their own new-releases model. The PS4 catalog, and Sony's hits, could be a huge plus for Sony on both the home hardware and sub/streaming front, certainly in the key early years of the next cycle. While we are imagining, let's imagine: it's 2020, you buy a PS5, and then for 15 or 20/month or whatever, you've got Bloodbourne, God of War, Spiderman, TLoU2, Dreams, and the rest all on tap? That would be a very tempting proposition I think.
And - of course - those games would be downloadable to your PS device or streamable to generics if you don't want to buy a PS4 or PS5. Netflix-style portability and streaming for PS content is here, now, and I'm not sure why it would go away or won't expand to more generic devices going forward.
