PlayStation Now Is Making Its Games Downloadable (kotaku.com)

PlayStation revealed in a blog post that PS Now subscribers will be able to download most PS4 and PS2 games currently in the PS Now Library and play them locally, offline. "Almost all PS4 games in the service, including Bloodborne, God of War 3 Remastered, NBA 2K16, and Until Dawn, will be available for download, in addition to the PS Now lineup of classic PS2 games remastered for PS4," the announcement reads. "This feature will be gradually rolled out to PS Now subscribers over the next couple of days, so if you don't see the feature on your PS Now today, make sure to check back again soon." Kotaku reports: While being connected to the internet isn't required to play PS Now games once they've been downloaded, the support page says your system will have to go online "every few days" in order to validate the PS Now subscription. In the past, PS Now had been exclusively for streaming games to your PS4. When it was announced in 2014, it was building off of Sony's 2012 acquisition of the Gaikai video game streaming service. While it offered a way for people to play older games on the newer console (since, unlike Xbox One, the PS4 isn't backwards compatible), it was hardly ideal due to problems with latency and its reliance on a consistently strong internet connection. Honestly, the only surprise here is that Sony didn't make this move sooner.

Comments

Imagine

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

[...] the support page says your system will have to go online "every few days" in order to validate the PS Now subscription.

What if others picked up on this?

What if when you get in your car, and turn your key, it had to check to make sure that you were current on your car note payment, that you had insurance, and why not, fuck it... a valid driver's license, before the engine would even turn over?

What if your refrigerator and pantry every so often would refuse to open until you stepped, barefoot, onto your wired, internet-connected bathroom scale, which would verify with the near-field-communications chip you had surgically implanted in your feet that you're the one being weighed, to ensure you haven't put on too much weight?

What if whenever you turn on a light in your house, or a water tap, the house calls the utility which does a check to make sure your payment method is still valid?

What if every time you swiped your credit card, the Point-of-Sale terminal or cash register, in addition to requesting authorization for the specific charge, ALSO did a soft-credit-pull to make sure you weren't a deadbeat, and that you pay your bills? What if they ran your name against a list of people who use stuff and return it an unusually high amount of the time, and declines the charge if you do that too often? OR, what if they just insist you sign an acknowledgement that all sales (for you) are final, telling you that you can buy something, but you're not going to be able to return it?

Every bit of this shit we put up with will only encourage the proliferation of this bad idea. I reject this out of hand; it's why I buy games on GOG.com, and not Steam or PSN... I don't want or need a game that comes with DRM, (or most anything else, for that matter,) especially if it's going to PHONE HOME periodically to make sure it's okay to run. You all can do as you like, but I won't support this.

Even if you think, "I agree, I'm not supporting this either, I only play cracked games..." you still bought the console itself, right? Even if they're selling it at a loss, the fact that you bought one helps bump up their numbers that they can claim they've sold without obviously lying, which helps convince others to invest in that platform by buying their consoles, (and usually games as well,) and then on top of that is the fact that your ownership of an instance of the console is always going to present a temptation to buy a game, especially if you REALLY want to play it and you can't find a cracked copy... the console itself acts as a vector for temptation to get you to reward them for putting "phones home" DRM on games. You're obviously not helping them as much as if you just bought the console and the games legitimately, and also in so-doing you are exposing yourself to legal liability just about the same as if you tried to slip a boxed game at a store down your pants and slink out with it, hoping to be unnoticed, which is really silly.

(As an aside, I wonder if anyone's ever tried the Attractive Nuisance defense against charges of "pirating" music, movies, TV shows, books or games?)