Playstation has a new offer

As of this writing, the PlayStation Now service offers more than 400 games, all of them drawn from the PlayStation 3 era. The service isn’t cheap — it costs $19.99 per month (recurring) and $44.99 if you pay in three-month blocks. Sony has offered a yearly subscription for $100, but it’s not clear if this deal is still widely available or not.

Not all games are included in the monthly subscription plan — some are only available to rent for a period of time ranging from four hours to three months. Pricing on these is hit-and-miss — some are a great deal, while others are a significant percentage of what you’d pay for a used disc copy.

On the whole, PlayStation Now seems like a great way to experience certain specific games from the PS3 era that you might have wanted to play. But it’s probably less than ideal if you’re a collector who wants to maximize your value per dollar. Renting old PS3 titles at fairly high cost isn’t a winning business model if you want to build a Netflix-like library and there aren’t any PS4 titles to pad things out. If PlayStation Now wants to offer something special, it should expand its back catalog into the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 era and offer a flat-rate subscription model that doesn’t limit some titles to temporary rentals with additional costs stacked on top of the monthly service.