In line with what I expected. I hope to see Sony expand into countries/regions where PS Now wasn't available before. Honestly thought we would get a little price hike from the regular PS+ tier. I might subscribe to PS+ Extra for a month on my PS4 if I could play Returnal lol.

Monthly prices are a bit high for the premium tier, but the annual prices are reasonable, it might even be great value proposition depending on how extensive the BC library is, and if Sony adds to it overtime. Hopefully Sony will add PS Vita & PS VR games down the line to further drive the value of this subscription down the road.

The most prominent feature that differentiates GamePass is the day 1 releases. Gaming journalists hyped this up as Sony's version of GamePass, when if you've actually be reading between the lines, was never going to happen. Sony never positioned this as a direct competitior ie. Like for like feature parody with MS.

Sony were never going to launch Horizon : Forbidden West, GT7, or GOW Ragnorok into the service at launch, and anyone expecting them to had unrealistic expectations. Sony has mentioned before, that that type of GamePass model is unsustainable for them. That's why we are seeing Returnal and Miles Morales launch into the service ; As they have made most of the return of investment from the games already.

It also sets an expectation of what could launch in the service going foward. A curated list of PlayStation Studio games from the previous 12-18 months (Among the other partner games). I think it's a good balance of value. Ultimately, it comes back to whether I see value in the extra 40 Euro per year, or an extra 60, and what additional benefits Sony wil offer. We have no idea on the list of legacy PS1, PS2, or PSP games will comprise of yet either.

Dunno about PC, but on PS5 (and likely PS4) you will be able to download the PS1, 2 and PSP titles to play without streaming. PS3 is the only one where only streaming is possible. Sure you may already have all the games you want to play on midia or otherwise, same as me, and won't sign to the service, same as me, but still it is possible to play on the hardware without any streaming artifact. Now if there will be any improvement to these legacy title remains to be seem.

Yep, for someone that didn't saw value on PSNow then it certainly is better to see what PS1,2,PSP titles they will bring at first and if they will improve the PS3,4 titles on there (PS5 titles I think for this year won't be much more than those 4 or 5 titles they announced). Hope they bring stuff that you find enjoyable and decide to sub, for me I don't think I'll for the time being (even though the price here for the Premium is like 80 USD).

Why is PS3 only streaming? Or did I misread that?

Probably because they don't want to spend the R&D budget to come out with a software emulator to enable playing PS3 games on the PS5.

At the end of the day it really does not matter if Sony stated this is a competitor or not to GP, it will always be viewed as such. Does Sony combine Plus and Now together if not for GP, who knows but it will always be viewed as a reaction to the success and push by MS with their services. If you own a MS console right now GP isn't a must but if things really start to kick off and Acti comes on board, the value proposition will be very high and probably a one to one where anyone getting a Xbox console also gets a GP sub.

As time goes on, each service will continue to be viewed and the value proposition will be measured. Personally for me, I never expected Sony to bring day one releases to their services but what is the time frame would they bring them. If its 1 years out from release, I would definitely pay up to the mid tier as I never need to play any game on release. To me that is a good acceptable time frame. If its 2 years from release then the value really falls for me and I probably see no need to upgrade.

Im not sure why they opted for a 2nd tier. They would have been fine with just a basic and a deluxe. Basic would be akin to the existing PS Now with streaming of PS3 games as well as streaming / downloading of PS2 and PS4 games. Those that offered online multiplayer would work fine without the need for + (as they do now).

The deluxe would take all of that and add in online multiplayer for retail games not in the service. PSP, PS1 & PS5 streaming / downloading as well as new game trials and cloud saves. It would have been pretty easy to have only two choices. The inclusion of a middle point that strips out the PS2/PS3 streaming/downloads and just makes it PS4/5 downloads only is pointless.

i guess one cool aspect that is kind of like GP is the new game trials. Sony may release day 1 trials for new releases and then you can choose to keep playing by paying the full game price to unlock that trial into the full game or go buy it at retail after your trial ends.

If they were set on the price for the full package, the second tier makes sense.  I am sure there are a number of people that do not care about PS3 streaming and the like, but would like access to a PS4/5 native library subscription.  This is for those people, and I have to give credit to the option because they could have left it out and forced people to pay the full price of tier 3 instead.

I wonder why they stopped doing that. Game trials were part of ps+ at the beginning. One or two hours to try out games.

This is from 9 years ago on ps3

Full Games Trials allow you to download the full version of a game to play for a limited time period. Any progress you make and trophies you earn are saved so if you decide to buy the game once the trial ends, you can pick up where you left off.

The amount of time that you have to play a full game trial will vary from game to game and this will be specified at the time of download.

Once the trial period has expired the content will no longer be available for you to play. To continue playing, go to the full game in PlayStation Store and purchase it. When you start the game for the first time after purchase your progress and all your trophies will be unlocked.

Maybe the cost of hosting the downloads was more than the percentage of people that actually bought the game after trying it out. Or maybe it actually put more people off from buying games that had trials.