FOR WEEKLY RENTALS, PLAYSTATION NOW'S PRICING IS REASONABLE
Four hours, 30 days, or 90 days, on the other hand? Well…PlayStation Now -- Sony's long-discussed streaming solution -- has officially entered open beta on PlayStation 4 starting today, and I was surprised, as I scrolled through the 122 games currently available, how reasonably priced many of these games are, specifically in the weekly rental category. (If you want to find PlayStation Now on your PS4, go to the PlayStation Store and scroll down to "PlayStation Now," the third option down from the bottom in the list on the left.)
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All 122 PlayStation Now Games, With Pricing
Now, let's be totally clear: the other rental options on Now -- four hours, 30 days, and 90 days -- seem to make very little sense, especially (but not limited to) the former. Why you'd rent a game for four hours is beyond me, especially at $2.99 a pop and up, which seems to be the territory where most of these games sit. Likewise, renting many of these games for a month or, more heinously, a full three months brings you into the pricing territory you'd be in if you just bought the game outright, whether new, used, or digitally. (It's weird, in this light, that Sony said EA Access isn't a good value, but somehow this is. But I digress.)
In other words, don't bother renting for four hours -- because paying for what is, in essence, a glorified demo makes no sense -- and if you're inclined to rent a game on PlayStation Now for longer than a week, you might as well just go ahead and look into buying it outright (though you'll have to have a PlayStation 3 to do so, as all of these games are from PS3's library).
...of the 122 games in the PlayStation Now library on PS4, 95 of them can be rented for seven days at a time, and the average cost of renting each of these games individually is $5.65, or about $0.81 a day.
By my count, out of the 122 games in the PlayStation Now library on PS4, 95 of them can be rented for seven days at a time, and the average cost of renting each of these games individually is $5.65, or about $0.81 a day. I won't get into whether the games available are terrible, bad, good, or great -- I think you'll find that they run the gamut -- but I will say that, at under a dollar a day, renting these games isn't going to break the bank. Indeed, it seems in line with pricing of rental games from back in the day, and when you take into account all important inflation, that means that renting from Now for a week is actually cheaper than it was at your local video store (this also doesn't take into account the quality of the Now streams, and whether or not they satisfactorily work).
This is in stark contrast to the four hour rentals -- what I will call "demo rentals" -- which seem to start at around $2.99, and are disingenuously displayed on PlayStation Now's interface with a "from $2.99" moniker. Don't rent a game at that price for that amount of time. It's ridiculous. Likewise, 27 games on PlayStation Now currently don't give you the option to rent for a week, typically only being available for a full 90 day rental, so you'll probably want to stay away from those. (I want to give a quick shoutout to Saints Row: The Third's absurd pricing of $4.99 for four hours or $29.99 for 90 days, with no in between.)
Rent Saints Row 3 for four hours or 90 days, or nothing in between. Because that makes sense.
Avoid four hour rentals like the plague, and go ahead and plug your PS3 back in if you're not down with weekly rentals...
It is worth noting that the aforementioned $5.65 average for a seven day rental has some caveats. That price is actually significantly spiked by some more expensive week-long rentals. In fact, 30 of the 122 games on PlayStation Now can be rented for a week for $3.99; 27 more can be rented for $5.99, and 16 more for $6.99. But there are five games available at $7.99 a week, a game at $8.99 a week, two at $9.99 a week, one at $11.99 a week, and two more at $14.99 a week. These higher prices cover games ranging from F1 2013 and Dirt 3 to Zone of the Enders HD Collection and Farming Simulator, so you're probably safe staying away from those rentals.
So, there's PlayStation Now's pricing in a nutshell. Avoid four hour rentals like the plague, and go ahead and plug your PS3 back in if you're not down with weekly rentals, as the prices when you go above that may just recommend buying those games outright.
But seven day rentals? I'm not seeing anything worth worrying about there.
