With Sony’s cloud streaming service due to launch this summer in North America, what does the future hold for the next-generation of consoles? Will there even be any need for a PlayStation 5 as Sony puts an increasing focus on cloud gaming by ensuring that its portfolio of games are available to all those who seek them, regardless of what device they own?
It’s a question that even Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei “Shu” Yoshida doesn’t know the answer to. Speaking in an interview with re-code a few weeks ago, Yoshida-san chatted about the company’s “shift to [be] service-oriented,” and stated that the future is in the hands of the game creators.
“If they still feel that we need more machine power — ‘We want to realize this and that and that, but we cannot do [it] with PS4′ — if that’s the case, there’s a good reason to have PS5, so that developers can create their vision. So, we’ll see.”
With PlayStation Now due to launch in the summer, consumers will be able to get their gaming fix through the cloud not only on PlayStation consoles but on televisions, tablets, and smartphones. The service will stream full games and users will be able to save all their game files in the cloud. It all sounds fantastic, if it actually works as well as Sony hopes it will.
Sony can certainly learn lessons from the demise of OnLive, which was touted as the “future of gaming.” The cloud gaming service was awful. It wasn’t backed by enough publishers, which resulted in a deluge of old games on the store that nobody wanted to play, while low resolution issues and latency problems made many of those games uncomfortable to play.
The main issue is that broadband connections just aren’t reliable enough. A report in The Telegraph this week brandishes the headline: “Britain’s worst broadband areas take 15 hours to download a film.” Indeed, connection speeds across the country, and indeed Europe, aren’t up to scratch. For PlayStation Now to provide a smooth gaming experience, Europe has to have stable broadband download speeds; with so many different providers dishing out varying connection speeds, it’s going to be nightmare to roll out PlayStation Now worldwide. Consequently, there’s a real concern about its performance, which simply won’t be of a consistent high quality across the globe. Who wants to play a laggy game?
Continued overleaf…
@page
No doubt, Sony is powerful enough to be able to get publishers on board, while one major hook of the service could be exclusive games that are only available to those who use the service. Even then, do gamers really want a streaming service at all? We’re not sure they do. Of course it’s handy to be able to store game save files in the cloud but we already experience (more so in the U.K. than North America) what it’s like to suffer from unstable broadband connections that kick us out of games or give our competitors the edge due to latency problems. Isn’t this issue going to be even worse if all games moved to the cloud in the future until fast, reliable broadband connections are the norm?
We’re a long way of that happening across the major territories, which is going to give the PlayStation Now service a fairly rough start to its life. Sony may be pumped up for cloud gaming, but were not sure the rest of the world is ready for it to replace the console just yet.
What are your thoughts on the future of PlayStation Now? Let us know in the comments below.