Playstation Now Thoughts - CES 2014

Yesterday in Las Vegas  at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES), during Sony's press conference led by CEO Kaz Hirai, Playstation CEO Andrew House unveiled Playstation Now, a cloud streaming service that will stream PS3 games to the PS4, Vita, and select Sony Bravia TV's with bluetooth support for Dualshock 3. In it's current state, it's just specifically running a few PS3 games like The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls. Expect this to expand greatly, going into the PS2 and PS1 catalog for sure. Sony also said that this will eventually expand to smartphones and other TV's, not just made my Sony. That right there was surprising me as most of their services are strictly available that their products only. In the meantime, that also demonstrates their commitment to really make this work. It's also a little concerning to me on the means that this is coming also to TV's and smartphones (more on that later).

I find this a very interesting concept. It doesn't COMPLETELY solve the issues of not having backwards compatibility on the PS4, but it's very comforting to know that very soon I could be playing Grand Theft Auto 5 via streaming the through the cloud, assuming Rockstar Games isn't producing a next-gen version already, which I would honestly much rather see come to fruition, which brings my next point!

The average household internet speed in the U.S now is around the 5-10 mbps range (thank you Google), but for people like that live in the rural extremes of Central Illinois (yes, I just called it that), this is the where the issue comes in. As I've seen from IGN.com editors standpoint, there aren't any real latency problems with these games running on the cloud, but to the typical gamer, there are noticeable compression issues with these games being streamed. Sony has said the the recommended minimum bandwidth speed for this service is 5 mbps. That basically leaves people in my case in the dust, where I test at least a 3 times a week, and I get 1.50 mbps on good day. It's very understandable, and really it's impressive enough that all you need is 5, but this probably wouldn't be possible on a connection as low as mine. That's ok. That my friends just shows the benefits of living in a town that has a population higher than 350. With that said, would it even run at all if I used it? If it did, how bad would the games look? Simply put, I wouldn't invest in it YET just because of having a bad connection. It also hasn't been said if this is going to be incorporated in Playstation Plus, or a separate service on it's own, with a yet unspecified price model

One last concern, which may not even be that valid, but it's in the back of my head. I guess I can understand these games running T.V's via bluetooth connected Dualshock 3 controllers, but how would this work on smartphones? There's still tons of questions that have been left unanswered with this being a new announcement, but for some reason it's hard to think of these games like The Last of Us running on a iPhone 5s. Would these phones have the torque to run these? I know it's being completely streamed from the cloud but It's very surprising and ambitious to me, but there's no reason they can easily pull it off and make it VERY successful.

This is a lot longer than I originally intended but it's just very interesting to see these announcements and it really makes you think about the future with gaming and tech. This service has SO much potential it's overwhelming just to think about all the things that could be coming the future.

There will be a closed beta starting at the the end of the month, and a full on launch coming this summer. It seems at launch there's only going to be a select few games but expect that change drastically once this service is up and running.

That's it for now, Stay Frosty!