Every Game You Meant to Play

Streaming ate film, then music, and in August 2017 it finally came for games. PlayStation Now launched in Europe with over 400 PS3 and PS4 titles available for €16.99 a month—which on paper is a genuinely good deal, better than buying even two games in a month, and the library at launch wasn’t filler. Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us, Asura’s Wrath—these were the games people recommend and never actually lend you.

The streaming model works differently in your head than subscription music does. With Spotify I already felt detached from the music, even back when I bought CDs. Games always had a different weight. I’d spent years buying them at full price, finishing half, abandoning the rest, watching a backlog accumulate like a ledger of personal failure. The subscription model is supposed to dissolve that pressure. You can try anything. You don’t have to finish it. You paid for access, not for the specific thing. Whether that makes you more free or just more scattered is a question nobody answers in the press releases.

The practical concern in 2017 was latency—streaming a game that requires precise input over a standard home connection was a gamble, and Sony’s infrastructure wasn’t Netflix-level yet. But the idea had landed. The buffet model had arrived. Someone would eventually solve the technical side, and when they did, the backlog problem wouldn’t disappear—it would just change shape. Not too many games to afford, but too many games to choose from at any given moment. Which was basically where we already were.