Building on the revamped PlayStation Plus offerings last year, Sony has announced a new PS5 Cloud Streaming feature coming to those who subscribe at the Premium membership level.
What is PS5 Cloud Streaming?
While some cloud streaming was already used to deliver PlayStation 3 games to PS5, this new feature is about letting players stream PlayStation 5 games, dodging download times, file size, and other inconveniences that can come up. Launching with the streaming capabilities will be many of the biggest PlayStation 5 Plus Games like Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West, and Mortal Kombat 11. Non-Plus collection titles like Resident Evil 4, Genshin Impact, and Fortnite will also be streamable.
Taking further advantage of the PS5 Streaming technology will be PS5 Game Trials for some titles. While there's nothing like a definitive list at this time, they state that AAA games like Hogwarts Legacy, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and The Calisto Protocol will be playable in this way at launch.
The obvious comparison for this service is Microsoft's XCloud which similarly lets players stream Xbox games via the cloud. It launched fully in 2021, after slowly allowing more devices to stream Xbox games, the opposite approach to what Sony is taking here. At launch, the PlayStation 5 Cloud Streaming will only be available on the PS5, but their announcement explictly says that it is so at launch, so it is likely to expand to other platforms in the future (Bloodborne on PC might finally happen!)
The PS5 Cloud Stremaing will roll out on a staggered basis later this month. It will launch in Japan on October 17th, Europe on October 23rd, and North America on October 30th.
PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for October
While the PlayStation Plus October games for all members were announced a couple weeks ago, today Sony revealed what games would be joining the PS Plus Extra and Premium catalog. All titles will be available on October 17th, and are aimed at fitting the Halloween season.
The list of games are: Gotham Knights, Disco Elysium, The Dark Pcitures Anthology: House of Ashes, Alien: Isolation, Dead Island, Outlast 2, Elite Dangerous, FAR: Changing Tides, Gungrave G.O.R.E. Eldest Souls, and Roki.
For PlayStation Plus Premium members there are also four new additions ot the classics line up. First up are Tekken 6, and Soulcaliburn: Broken Destiny, to give you fighting game throwback experiences, and then you have Ape Escape Academy, and IQ Final. All are playable on both PlayStation 4, and 5.
This marks a continuation of a period of transition for PlayStation Plus, as the PS5 Cloud Streaming is coming out only a couple months after the price for the subscription was significantly increased. Owning a PlayStation is getting more expensive, as we're also seeing price hikes to the PlayStation 5 Digital model as well, putting a burden on Sony to prove the offerings of their console and services are worth the increased asking price.
