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jpxxx

There were quite a few true innovations shown off in this endless whatever:

-- silent preloading of games you may be interested in

-- immediate local play of digital titles while they download

-- OnLive/Gaikai style video streaming of full disc games you haven't yet purchased

-- rolling video replay of your screen as a core system service

-- Mobile-style instant system hibernation

-- continuously streaming your display to remote friends

-- allowing remote friends to assume control over your currently playing game

All of these are welcome, but "play the full game as a streamed demo" and "preload digital games of likely interest" are brilliant, wiping out so many pain points from digital software purchasing.

(and back to cynicism: every game they showed off was pre-rendered nonsense, their target market is plateauing at best, mobile's strangling them, etc etc etc)

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>-- OnLive/Gaikai style video streaming of full disc games you haven't yet purchased

What everyone seems to worry about here is that Sony can use this against piracy and/or game resale. Going streaming-only is a long-term direction that, if implemented right, could well improve Sony's bottom line and introducing it gradually is a great means for them to ensure gamers don't simply take their business elsewhere when it is the only option left.

Take the ability to stream older PS1-PS3 titles. Old titles can be a source of free money for a publisher like Sony but due to those titles' smaller size they are especially easy to pirate (according a torrent tracker the entire PSN PSX collection takes up around 58.7 GiB; that's 179 game titles for the PlayStation). Streaming would eliminate the possibility of this kind of piracy.

Still, I think you can make a strong argument that Sony won't implement a stream-only policy for games this generation since in the US, a key market, far too many of gamers just don't have the bandwidth yet.

>-- rolling video replay of your screen as a core system service

You've got to note that this feature will be "free" in terms of computational resources for every streamed game.

Forget about streaming older PS1-PS3 titles - the hardware will not be compatible this time, so earlier games won't work at all unless their developers make a time consuming port to quite differenct hardware architecture.

They create emulators on the server side and stream the games to whatever architecture is running the client. It's one of the main reasons they purchased Gaikai.

That seems like a massive, unworkable kludge that will frustrate users more often than it actually works.

Wasn't it a gaming company that basically did that? (video game streaming). I think their technology was fine and they were doing good, until they were bought.

All of those features require constant data streams except one.

In a country like Australia where we have data caps, pretty much the ONLY feature above that will actually benefit us, is the feature that involves us turning the console off.

Ironic.

Wow, Data Caps in you home connection?, You should really fight against that..

Comcast and AT&T, two of the largest ISPs in the US, also have data caps.

The PS4 sounds like a pretty good reason for consumers to demand capless data. Along with services like Netflix this should diminish the market for crippled net access.

consumers can demand all they want. it downy doesn't mean they will get anything. the bandwidth problem in Australia is due to the small population, and distance from the rest of the world.

> -- silent preloading of games you may be interested in

This is only brilliant if consumers don't have data caps.

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