How prepared are we for the streamable future?

Let's start off talking a bit about how the different brands are working as of right now. Sony Playstation have, besides the pretty much mandatory PS+ service, also a service they like to call Playstation Now. The Now service offers the opportunity to stream Playstation games from the older generations (Playstation 2 & Playstation 3) you also get the chance to play PS4 titles you don't already own and play it on your PC. The idea of the service is pretty much what you would expect, the problem with it is that it has taken Sony forever to get it out on the market and available for the majority of people. I live in sweden and here we only got it two weeks ago. And since not all games are available for download you must stream your games and with that there is always this problem with how fast your internet is and how much bandwidth the service uses. Playstation + is a must have if you want to do any kind of online gaming, you also get selected games that you can claim and keep forever, are these games free? Not really since you pay a monthly subscription fee.

Nintendo, this company often accused of being conservative or backwards thinking, they also offer a online service simply called Nintendo Switch Online. Plain and simple. So far so good huh? But no, Nintendo has so much to learn from their competitors when it comes to online gaming. Take a simple thing that you take for granted such as chatting with your friends, this is possible. But only through the mobile application. This would not even be considered okey five years ago… But with the subscription you can also download a app on your Switch. It is through this app that you can play old NES games, new games get available every month. At this point though it is only NES games and I would love to see Nintendo introduce games from other generations such as the GameCube or the N64.

Let´s move on to Xbox. Much like Playstation Plus Microsoft also offers a paid subscription which give you access to play online with your friends, you also get the monthly “free” games. Just like the PS+. But there are one huge difference when comparing these two brands. Instead of implementing a streaming service to let you stream your older games the Xbox One have backwards compatibility built in. This is a feature that got people upset when announced, why not make it available on launch when it was that easy to implement it later?

Microsoft is also offering the Play Anywhere which makes it possible to play all your Xbox games (that are compatible, which all new games are) on your PC. This is great from a consumer perspective, but it really makes you wonder, why would Microsoft let you play an Xbox exclusive game on your PC?

I simply think Microsoft is way ahead of the competition right here, they are preparing themselves for a future where the physical console is no more and it will be all about the platform rather than the console. And that future will soon be upon us.