I haven’t been keeping up with the news on the PS4 or played it in a while. So today when I fired it up, and went to see what was new and free for the PS Plus members on the store, I was surprised to see a rental service called Playstation Now. I was intrigued, and my first thought was “hmm, maybe it’ll have some good old PS1 or PS2 games that I haven’t played in a long time. I should check this out!”

So, with all the anticipation of a kid opening their first gift at Christmas, I did check it out and I made a list of the games I might want to rent. After I couldn’t find anything, I decided to look up the games that I have played or might want to try again sometime in the future and put them on a list. Since the price on most games was set at from 2.99 I thought, “Ok, this could be reasonable.”

Oh, how foolish my optimism was. When I saw the price model, a wave of nausea took over. I felt the heartbreak of a kid at Christmas who just wanted one small thing and didn’t get it. I didn’t understand how they came up with this strange price model and have pretty much ruined any chance they had for making this a good service. As I started delving deeper I kept thinking this couldn’t be right, it has to be an error. Unfortunately it was not, and the first game I came across was Dead Island Riptide.

You can rent Dead Island Riptide for 4 hours at a price of $3.99! Yes, that is one dollar for every fun filled hour you force yourself to play this gem. This was an impulse buy that I bought on the steam sale for $4.99 so that I could finish out the Dead Island series! That $5 gave me unlimited (though not worth it) time with this game for only one dollar more! I did some research and found that you can buy a brand new copy of this game for $19.99 at Gamestop, or you could rent it for 90 days for $24.99 off of the value packed Playstation Now service.

Now, Dead Island Riptide isn’t a very good game and not one that most people would buy or rent (damn you steam sale!). So let’s move to a good game, Metal Gear Solid 4. Many people have played this excellent PS3 title, but if you haven’t, you can rent it from this great service for $3.99 for four hours. There are many other options too, like $7.99 for seven days, 12.99 for a month, or even 14.99 for three months. Or you could go to Gamestop and pick up a used copy for $6.99 and have it forever, $19.99 for a new copy.

I don’t understand who this service is supposed to be catering to. When I first saw that this was a rental service my imagination took over with thoughts of being able to rent new and good games at reasonable prices, and possibly PS1 and PS2 games sprinkled in. I can go to redbox and rent a brand new ps3 game for $2 for 24 hours. There is no need to even mention gamefly which is far superior in terms of value. What it seems that we have received was a few good games, a bunch of ok and bargain bin games that you are able to rent at bargain bin prices. So I have a question. Why would you use this service when you can go out and buy pretty much any of these games at cheaper prices?