http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/7/5284294/sony-announces-playstation-now-cloud-gaming
The PlayStation 4 may not be the most important part of Sony's gaming strategy anymore. Sony has just announced PlayStation Now, a service that will bring streaming PlayStation games not only to PS4, but also PS3, PlayStation Vita, and even televisions, tablets, and smartphones.
It appears to be the company's public-facing brand for
Gaikai, the cloud gaming technology it purchased in June of 2012, which the company previously said
would bring PS3 games to the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita later this year. Sony says the technology is already working here at CES, with attendees able to try critically acclaimed action title
The Last of Us here in Vegas. Sony will launch a closed beta in the United States at the end of the month, and plans to roll out the service more broadly by the end of this summer.
"The tethers that have constrained consumption for decades... soon dissolve," said Sony CEO Kaz Hirai.
Gaikai works on practically any device — even smartphones — because the games don't actually run locally at all. Cloud gaming services work more like a YouTube video, where powerful servers in remote data centers actually run the games, and stream compressed video frames of that game running to your local devices. They send the input from your touchscreen or game controller to the cloud. It doesn't necessarily require an extremely fast internet connection, but it does require one with very low latency, so that the time between you pressing a button, and the time you see the reaction, is as short as possible.
Originally, Gaikai only streamed PC games to the web and to televisions, racking up deals with Samsung and LG to bring games like
The Witcher 2 to their devices, but when Sony nabbed the technology it apparently figured out a way to have those servers emulate legacy PlayStation 3 titles as well. We haven't yet heard how, but it's one way to run PS3 games on PS4. Right now,
games from previous PlayStation systems don't work if you stick them in the PS4's disc drive.
We also haven't yet heard how Sony plans to charge for cloud gaming — whether PlayStation Now will be a subscription service, or require you to buy games, or whether it will just serve up demos. Gaikai's original business pitch was merely as a way to get a taste of a game before you buy it normally, and Gaikai CEO David Perry
appeared to echo that sentiment when he appeared on the Sony stage last February.
