Sony PlayStation Now Game Streaming Service Announced
[CES 2014] It’s been a while since Sony acquired Gaikai, a game streaming service, and it wasn’t too long ago that we were wondering how Sony might implement it. Well the good news is that at CES 2014, the company wasted no time in unveiling a new service called PlayStation Now, which is essentially Sony’s game streaming service that will be making its way onto consoles and other Sony devices, like Sony’s Bravia TVs, come 2014. The service will be hitting the brand new PlayStation 4 and its predecessor, the PlayStation 3, first, followed by the PlayStation Vita at a later date. Sony’s 2014 lineup of new Bravia TVs are also expected to support PlayStation Now as well.
So what is PlayStation Now? Well it’s a new service from Sony that allows gamers to stream games directly from the cloud, as well as to save their progress in the cloud as well, letting them pick up where they left off as if they were playing a game locally on the console. There will be a subscription service which would give gamers access to a range of titles. Technically PlayStation Now could work on a host of devices as the game does not run locally at all, where all the processing is done on Sony’s end and then streamed to you onto your device. In a way this is similar to other services like YouTube, except that it is for gaming.
Sony did not mention how much a subscription to PlayStation Now would cost, but a Beta program is expected to take place towards the end of January for those living in the US, and they expect to have a full rollout later in the summer. Sounds pretty exciting and we are definitely looking forward to seeing how it will fare!