Sony lowers price of PS Now streaming service and adds 'marquee' titles

Sony has significantly expanded its PlayStation Now roster and lowered the price of the streaming service to push its cloud gaming offering forward. 

A monthly PS Now subscription will now cost $9.99 in the United States, down from $19.99 per month. The price of quarterly and annual subscriptions have also been lowered, and will go for $24.99 (previously $44.99) and $59.99 (previously $99.99) respectively. 

Explaining those reductions, Sony said it wanted to make PS Now a more "compelling" proposition that's comparable to other entertainment subscription services on the market. Xbox Game Pass, for instance, is already $9.99 per month, while a monthly Stadia Pro subscription will cost $9.99 when Google's streaming service arrives later this year. 

Sony has also laid out plans to add more "marquee" titles to PS Now, starting with big names like God of War, Grand Theft Auto V, Infamous Second Son, and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. Those games will be available until January 2, 2020, and will be joined by new additions each month. 

Analysts claim the company's new strategy is designed to maintain its cloud gaming leadership as competitors like Microsoft and Google pick up the pace, but added that PS Now will still play second fiddle behind Sony's core console business for the time being.

"Sony is the biggest cloud gaming operator in the market today. In 2018, the company had a 36 percent share of the overall market and generated $140 million in consumer spending," commented IHS Markit analyst Piers Harding-Rolls. 

"While PS Now cannot compete with the first-party day and date releases Microsoft bundles into Xbox Game Pass, PS Now’s offer of streaming, and a bigger catalog of games, at a similar price point, makes Sony’s service a lot more competitive.

"The entire cloud gaming market was worth $387 million in 2018 and is forecast to growth to $630 million in 2019 as new services launch and existing services become more relevant to a broader set of consumers. We predict the cloud gaming market will be worth $2.5 billion by 2023, less than 2% of the overall games market at this time."