Sony announced that the PlayStation Now service will cease for PS3, PlayStation Vita starting April 1st, 2017. Not only that, but according to the PlayStation Blog, the PlayStation Now service will also cease operating on PlayStation TV, Sony’s smart TVs, and Samsung’s smart TVs.
The cessation of the PlayStation Now service is no big surprise for the lesser popular platforms. In fact, Sony is taking the service shutdown a bit further by also announcing that 2016 models of the Sony Bravia TVs will also be discontinued on April 1st.
On the page, they tell Bravia owners to disable their auto-renewal subscriptions before April to avoid being charged for PlayStation Now.
• PlayStation 3
• PlayStation Vita and PlayStation TV
• All 2013, 2014, 2015 Sony Bravia TV models
• All Sony Blu-ray player models
• All Samsung TV models
Sony is pushing for users to switch over to use the PlayStation Now service for PC and PS4. If you don’t have a PC that can run PlayStation Now? Sucks to be you. Don’t want to buy a PS4? Too bad, you don’t have much of a choice.
PlayStation Now is essentially limiting its use to the two most popular platforms. Axing the service on PS Vita makes me think that eventually they might be calling it quits on the handheld. Sony’s been having trouble getting their portable devices off the ground to compete effectively against Nintendo’s DS and 3DS.
It doesn’t seem to bode well for the future of PlayStation Now given that the high price of subscription and the fact that it relies on cloud streaming to offer gamers the only form of backwards compatibility for the PS4. It’s a shame that Sony didn’t just offer real backwards compatibility like Microsoft did for the Xbox One.
I tend to doubt this move will affect too many users since it seems unlikely that a lot of smart TV owners would use their television to stream old PS3 games by the cloud, especially when it would just be cheaper to buy PS3 and bundled used games from eBay for the same price. But even still, for people who did enjoy using their TVs for such functionality… it’s now gone.
In a separate post they also noted that the PlayStation Video would also be coming to an end on April 12th, which was available for certain Sony Bravia TVs.