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PlayStation Now Will Bring PS4 Games to your PC (engadget.com)
You could soon play PlayStation 4 exclusives like Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us Remastered on your PC. From a report on Engadget: Sony is bringing the PS4 catalog to its streaming game service PlayStation Now, the company said today in a blog post. The announcement is light on details, but we know that every game in the service, including PS4 games, will be part of a single PS Now subscription.
Would it be reasonable to assume they actually don't have racks of PS4s and robots running around plugging in DVDs everytime someone requests a different game? I'm guessing they are running a (very good) PS4 emulator on server-grade (say Intel/nVidia/Linux) platforms.
If so, it makes me wonder what it would take to get our hands on said emulator.
I don't have a Playstation, but this may be the push I need to take over the PSN account someone named Jared set up using my gmail address. (Apparently Sony's account setup process doesn't have a "Click the link we emailed you to verify you actually typed the address correctly," step.)
More disturbingly, neither does Match.com. (Disturbing due to how your inbox looks 4 hours after a 62-year-old woman signs up for a dating service using your email account.)
Redundancy is good And also good.
I totally agree with you but I strongly suspect that most games companies see this as the future, and that the days of actually having your own copy of anything are numbered.
We're already seeing the same thing happening with the popularity of streaming audio vs. locally stored music, despite all the obvious downsides.
That's OK - According to ca every PC gamer I've met in the last 4-5 years, you can buy a PC with much more CPU power, much more GPU power, a lot more RAM, SSD storage and better everything else, for less than the cost of a (latest) Playstation.
Oddly enough, you don't even have to ask about it or anything - just mention that you have a console, and they'll explain the cost-advantage of owning a PC faster than a gluten-allergic vegan will say the word, "like".
Just like already happened with streaming audio, the people that actually give a shit about stuff like audio/visual quality and lag will be in the definite minority, and they will be increasingly marginalized until there are so few of us left, they can just stop supporting us without any impact to their profits.
The sheeple consumers that will buy into streaming games are probably not the people that ever had a top-end PC so won't even know or care what they are missing, and will just appreciate the convenience of not needing a PC/console at all.
Then the next generation will grow up just thinking that the low-res lossy graphics and lag are as good as it can ever get, and no doubt nVidia/AMD will come out with a whole new range of products just to improve the graphics and lag of streaming games, probably by defining/using a whole new protocol that will still run the game remotely (so games companies can avoid giving consumers any opportunity to pirate the games) but the graphics will be rendered locally. And here we go round the equivalent of the console loop again with more opportunity for the companies to sell new hardware.