Earlier this week, I gave in to temptation and purchased a three-month PlayStation Now (PS Now) subscription. Amazon had a special, and I wanted to take advantage of it to try out the service. My partner also got one and we were both excited.

Allow me to preface what I’m about to say by saying something else: I think this tech is ambitious and there are many amazing games on offer.

However.

My (and my partner’s) early experiences are making me grateful I didn’t plunk down for the year subscription.

The first game I booted up was the original Borderlands. I should interject here that my PS4 is hard wired in to the router. Our internet is fast and stable. I seldom have connection issues on any of my PlayStation systems. But there was stuttering for sure when I started playing Borderlands. I thought that once I had been playing it for a while that the frame rate would get into a groove. It didn’t. I also felt like the game didn’t control as well as usual.

But the real let down was when I tried to take a screenshot.

No go.

I know that might seem insignificant, but I adore screenshots. When I realized that I wouldn’t be able to take screenshots of Borderlands, Infamous, or any of the other games on the service, I was disappointed.

I’m still going to take advantage of my subscription over the next few months, but at this point, I’d far prefer just tracking down the older games for my PS3 and going about them that way for a more stable experience.

I felt cautiously optimistic about carrying on until last night when my partner booted up PS Now on his PS4 and started to play Infamous.

The game didn’t run nearly as smooth for him as Borderlands ran for me (and that wasn’t perfect by far) and, after less than an hour, the sound dropped out entirely.

Not a good look.

He couldn’t get the sound to come back, so eventually he stopped playing the game.

Before that transpired, he stepped away from the system for about ten minutes. When you begin using PS Now, it tells you that if you are idle for an extended period, then PS Now will terminate the game so it doesn’t unnecessarily put a drain on their servers.

My partner stepped away for ten minutes and by the time he came back, the game was shut down. That seemed like an awfully brief time frame to allow for someone to be away from a game before PS Now gives up on them.

I mean, really, ten minutes could be walking the dog around the block. It could be someone having a not so good time in the restroom. It could be getting a beverage or making a snack. Ten minutes seems like a moderately brief amount of time. Though, in honesty, I’m unsure what the sweet spot would be. Would 15 minutes be good? 30 minutes? I honestly don’t know. I just thought it was a bit silly to shut a game down after ten minutes.

So, while we may not be having a collectively great time with PlayStation Now, we are both still looking forward to trying to play some games before our three-month subscriptions run out. I’m sure there are people out there who haven’t had any issues at all with it, and I’m glad for them, truly. I’m just a little disappointed in the service, so far.

Have you ever bought into any new tech that you were disappointed by? If so, what was it?

Have a great weekend out there, friends! May your backlogs ever dwindle.