Come together, right now, over me

Today in the “You know this is inevitable right?” department, Playstation are on a marketing blitz to get more people to sign up for its streaming service. Having cut the price in half ahead of the launch of competing services from Microsoft and Google, this is about to resemble the streaming wars we’re seeing play out among Netflix, HBO, Apple and others.

The catch here is it’s more akin to Spotify’s disruption of the music industry than it is where you can watch Parks & Recreation online. Developers are used to getting somewhere between $40–$100 for a title, like music acts were used to selling their product for $10–$15, the main difference being nobody is going to pay an additional $50 to go to Madison Square Garden and watch the lead developer re-write game code.

I don’t know enough about what is or isn’t involved in terms of what you do or don’t have access to, but a few things stand out:

• At some point, much like Fleabag, Game of Thrones or Stranger Things, the services will bleed together, only separated by the genuine proprietary hits that the owner of the platform is responsible for
• Given some portion of the PlayStation library is available via this service on PC, it’s only a matter of time before access via a console becomes undifferentiated and therefore irrelevant
• Will this shift mean an unleashing of content and titles similar to the abundance of music Spotify has made available? Will it also aggregate earnings to the dominant titles, making it harder for independent developers to earn meaningful revenue the way Spotify has made it harder for independent artists?

It is inevitable over time that PlayStation (and Microsoft, and everyone else) divests itself of differentiated hardware and focuses its efforts on developing and publishing hit content (see also Amazon focusing on getting voice into as many devices as possible rather than solely pursuing it’s own hardware). The margins are better and it is the only true means of standing out form the crowd. In the interim it will be most interesting to see who makes it possible for something like Monument Valley to emerge, and who creates an environment where the big companies are simply spinning out endless iterations of the same set of superheroes year after year.