PlayStation 4 And Cloud Gaming: Yay Or Nay?

Spurred on by a comment by Gaikai creative force, Earthworm Jim’s dad and all-round dreamboat Dave Perry (not the first ever Play editor), we got to thinking about cloud gaming and the future of PlayStation.

Here’s the words he said, handily stolen wholesale from Destructoid:

“You don’t want to be a console that doesn’t [have cloud gaming functionality]. This future is coming, trust me. We’re well-funded. This is going to happen. OnLive is already making it happen. You need to be prepared for that.”

Reading around a few comments threads, it becomes abundantly clear that people have immediately engaged their Wah Gland and started boo-hooing about a future that might see things change a bit. Fair enough: gamers are well known for fearing change (at least until change is introduced and they all realise it’s actually a Good Thing).

But nobody’s saying cloud gaming is the entire future – just a part of it. I’ve actually gone on about this before, with OnLive being part of the future of gaming, not the whole future. And I can definitely see a future incarnation of the PlayStation – let’s call it ‘a PlayStation 4’ – using cloud gaming.

But not as the main thing – there’s still too much invested in physical media, especially by Sony with their stake in Blu-ray and the thousands of different proprietary memory devices they insist on releasing. That part of it isn’t going away any time soon.

But cloud functionality, as an additional element on top of everything else – why wouldn’t they do that? Surely the hardware costs can’t be very much at all, and it would open up the world of demos and rentals to a massive new audience. Plus companies could make more money out of it, and we all know how much they bloody love making money.

It’s win-win-win-win-win-win-win-draw-win. Any detractors are living in a very strange world indeed.

Anyway, enough chat of PS4, let’s go back to the warm embrace of the PS3.

[image from hnyah]