I have been rather enjoying Sony’s newly revised PS Plus subscription service, despite my early reticence. Once I saw the number of titles on offer that I was actually interested in playing, I knew I had to have it. And by “have it,” I mean “pay to sign up for the Premium tier.”
Not only have I been having a good time playing some older PS3-era titles, but I’ve also been surprised by how well the streaming has been working for me, since you cannot download any of these older games and play them locally.
I’ve struggled in the past to get Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia’s GeForce NOW to work reliably and consistently, so I wasn’t expecting much success with PS Plus. But so far, it’s kind of great. And even though I would’ve much preferred the Game of the Year edition of Fallout 3 instead of the vanilla, DLC-free version, beggars can’t be choosers — especially when it streams like a dream.
And so all of that is just fine and dandy. The catalogue, although small at launch, has some bangers in it, and the quality in presentation — at least for me — has been mostly flawless. So what could I possibly find to gripe about?
Well, it seems that you cannot take screenshots while streaming games. More specifically, I have not found a native way to take screenshots while streaming PS3 games on my PS5. When I attempt to capture a screenshot, I instead get an error message that says screenshots are disabled while game streaming. I would supply you with a screenshot of this error message, but I am not able to take one.
I suppose this kind of makes sense. I mean, I know nothing about how game streaming actually works, or even how screenshots work for that matter. I know that some video streaming services block screenshots, although I always just assumed that was for copyright reasons. I can usually screenshot a YouTube video on my phone, though, so it can’t be flat-out impossible across the board. Heck, you can capture screenshots while streaming Disney+ content on PS5 — a feature that’s blocked on even the in-browser version of Disney+. So this seems more like a deliberate choice than a technology limitation.
I’ve been looking through the settings menu in the hopes of finding a switch to flip, perhaps a toggle that by default is set to off, that would allow me to shoot some screens, but nothing has surfaced in my investigation. I acknowledge the possibility that I am just missing something here. In my defense, though, I am not the first person to scratch my head over the lack of screenshot-taking in PS Now.
It’s not like I need to further clutter up my SSD with images and videos that I will likely never view after the fact. But for the sake of writing articles, it is always nice to be able to document what you are describing, or to better encapsulate a general vibe, or to just show some really cool or goofy shenanigans.
So in case you’re wondering: No, you can’t take screenshots in PS Now. I don’t know why this is, but it seems to be the case universally. Hopefully Sony addresses this in the near future, but in the meantime, I will be enjoying my screenshot-less gameplay like it’s 20-freaking-10.
