Sony have been demoing a lot of games in the last couple of months, throwing aside an E3 full of game-based surprises to ensure two things: that the games (God of War, LittleBigPlanet Karting) get some free attention and – secondly – that they can concentrate on other things during the actual conference and let the press get their hands on the games with a little bit of background knowledge.
And whilst we heavily expect Sony to push the hell out of Vita in Los Angeles in a few days time (or at least we hope they do) we’re also wondering what else they might have up their sleeve. We’re going to assume that now isn’t a great time to announce new hardware – they need to concentrate on the new portable and ensure that gamers still buy into the likes of The Last Of Us. So, we’re thinking something else.
A service.
A service that, maybe, just maybe is tied into the recent chatter about PlayStation Plus. Something big is happening with Plus, but we don’t know what it is other than we’re happy to assume that it’s not just going to be a free game and that whatever’s going on is something a bit more interesting than a complimentary download – we get those anyway. So what could it be? What might Sony be planning for Plus?
Well, how about – and hear us out here – a game streaming service. What if, within your Plus subscription, you get the option to instantly test drive a game from whatever Sony have got stored in a central bank of PlayStation 3s? We’re not saying this will be free – it might be under a different tier of Plus or require separate payments, but anything is possible.
[drop2]We’re not the first to think about this, either – VG247 hinted at something similar this morning (especially in the comments) and there’s been chatter about OnLive on consoles for some months. What if Sony have managed to get together with someone like OnLive (or done it themselves) to really get across what the PS3 is all about without having to wait for eight gigs of data to download before you can start playing?And what about Vita? PlayStation Suite is surely going to feature heavily in Sony’s plans for the next six months or so. Perhaps the Android link could see OnLive – already available and impressive as an Android app – appear on the Sony portable? That would certainly breathe fresh life into the console that many are, in my opinion, prematurely writing off.
However, we really do have to re-iterate what we said this morning. Nobody’s told us anything official about any of this – nobody really does. We’ve got bookings at E3 but there’s nothing mentioned that might be clues – it’s all just wishful speculation (so don’t go out and buy PlayStation Plus on our say so) but there’s a few of us here on the same wavelength.
If this comes about it could be very interesting indeed – I’d personally love to see what all the games are about that I just don’t have time to download and play.
I guess we’ll see.
mynameisblair
My PS+ runs out 2 days after E3, so I’ll have time to see what the fuss is all about before renewing :)
The Lone Steven
And it will be down every week due to maintance by SCEE. ;)
I can see why as Onlive has proven that streaming is a profitable venture but i’m old fashioned and prefer having the physical copy of the game. Unless they invent a device that allows you to smell that brand new game smell.
Lymmusic
Pretty sure all the maintenance of late has been carried out so sony can implement new features of some kind… I cant see a streaming service this decade though, the inconsistencies in wifi and broadband speed in general means its kinda like setting a speed limit of 60 mph on all motorways, but then all car manufacturers start trying to sell only supercars to everyone…
More likely just ps plus announced for vita
rossthebassist
Maybe Sony is going to change its playstation plus offerings. so you get access to Onlive or whoever… and you still get free games from sony but maybe instead of having stacked months its simply a case of here is a couple of minis one month, here is a PSN title another…
But then again it depends on what the deal is… if sony have struck a deal where exclusive games such as uncharted and god of war are going to streamed to the service, thats a BIG deal for onlive or whoever… and can set them apart from the competition.
Kaminari
I don’t see anyone buying a PS3 and subscribing to PSN+ just to use their console as a generic streaming videogame terminal.
Who would want to pay for shitty OnLive/Gaikai versions of a game that they could play locally on their console in the best home picture quality possible?
Oh wait, there are still people using a PS3 to watch divx on their CRT…
rossthebassist
thats a point, how do we know that sony havent contacted onlive about using a similer service for Video Unlimited, instead of having to download…