Sony Unveils PS3 Streaming Service to PlayStation Now

It’s finally happening: A modern day console is finally getting backwards compatibility. If only that were as exciting news as it sounded.

A while back, Sony announced that it was working with an online streaming service to bring ‘backwards compatibility’ to the PlayStation 4, a much-requested feature that was omitted for… reasons. The promise was that you could, through the power of streaming, play all the games you had on the PS3 on your PS4. Well, just today, Sony went ahead and announced the release date of the service, called PlayStation Now, and detailed what it can and can’t do… and frankly, I’m a little disappointed.

Here’s how it works. Come January 13th, PlayStation Now will officially launch, allowing PS4 owners to sign up for either a one month (20 bucks) or a three month (45 bucks) subscription. Upon signing up, you get access to a library of 100+ PlayStation 3 games, such as The Last of Us, Ratchet and Clank, Bioshock Infinite, Splunky, and more—which you can play at your discretion. So it’s less like actual backwards capability and more like a subscription-based version of the Nintendo Virtual Console, which could be just as good as it is bad, depending on how you look at it. On one hand, a $20 monthly fee is a small price to pay to be able to play over a hundred last-gen games at will (and a lot more bang for your buck than the old PlayStation Now rental service) but on the other hand, if your internet isn’t good enough to stream or it goes out, you don’t get much of anything.

Fortunately, come launch, all current PlayStation 4 users will get a free seven-day trial period to test it out for themselves. Also maybe a good time to finish those shorter games you always wanted to try but never got around to buying. Either way, while not the kind of backwards compatibility gamers have been begging for, it’s better than nothing.