Sony has announced that both the God of War Collection and Team ICO Collection are now available to play on your PlayStation Vita by streaming them from the PlayStation 3. Some games enable this already but they didn’t play too well because they were built around connectivity between PS3 and PSP, which has a slower band of wi-fi.
In order to play them on your PS Vita, you have to download an update for these games on your PS3. Sony hasn’t said what this update does but it may have something to do with Gaikai, the cloud gaming company Sony bought for $380 million earlier this year. I’m not too sure how this could be incorporated but maybe it’s something to do with how the games are encoded and streamed between the PS3 and Vita, which is an important part of cloud gaming, since you have to stream with as low a latency as possible, to make the game playable.
Whatever the case, this is one way of interactivity between the PS3 and Vita, along with Cross-buy and Cross-play, which Sony announced at Gamescom. Also, it will be interesting to see what Sony does with this in the long term, since streaming a game from a console to a portable device is a major selling point Nintendo are using for the upcoming Wii U, which has a controller with a screen built into it.
Maybe Sony is going to utilize this connectivity between the PS3 and Vita to combat Nintendo’s new console. We will wait and see.