The Wall Street Journal reckons that the Playstation 4, or whatever it ends up being called, will be able to stream previous generation games.
Tech website The Verge has also corroborated this report; lending some weight to the previously mooted idea that Sony‘s $380m purchase of Dave Perry led streaming specialist Gaikai, would be a large part of the new Playstation’s make-up.
We’ve got more on this after the break.
It seems the primary reason why the new Gaikai streaming tech will be leveraged for PS3 games and not newer PS4 titles, is down to the fact that the current streaming resolution bottleneck on Gaikai is 720p. This would be a somewhat of an issue with shiny and pristine PS4 games that would run (we hope) natively at 1080p, but it would obviously be far less of a problem with PS3 titles where the native 720p framebuffer isn’t exactly widely used to begin with.
In theory, the use of Gaikai in this fashion wouldn’t preclude other devices, such as smartphones, tablets and even the Playstation Vita from streaming PS3 games in this fashion either.
The possibilities are enticing to say the least.
The Japanese business news journal Nikkei, has also put some additional weight behind the claim, stating that Gaikai will be in attendance at the PS4 unveiling event next Wednesday; making a Playstation cloud-gaming solution all but inevitable alongside the announcement of new hardware.
In terms of actual business models however, the details are relatively unknown at this point; how would Sony allow owners of physical PS3 games to transfer their purchase across to the streaming service? Would they even allow that at all? How would current cloud save storage work with this new system?
There are lots of questions to be answered next Wednesday, including the matter of that pesky PS4 controller, we do hope you’ll pop back and immerse yourselves in our coverage of the event.
It’ll be great – promise.
The Playstation Event 2013 will take place in New York City on Wednesday, February 20th.
Source: The Verge, Wall Street Journal
