I’m sure I’ll be posting a lot of thoughts in the coming weeks and months about the Playstation 4, but I’m going to start off by talking about my favorite feature – or feature set, rather – about the console: its focus on downloadable content.
Or, rather, the focus on making downloadable content instant and invisible, or at least as much as is possible in this day and age.
Last July, Sony acquired streaming-game service Gaikai. Gaikai, for those of you not familiar with the name (don’t worry, most of us weren’t), created a set of streaming technologies that would operate similar to OnLive, but rather than creating a distinct service, they focused on partnerships that would embed their technology into websites and devices. There was a lot of speculation surrounding Sony’s purchase of Gaikai, most of it centered around whether or not the PS4 was going to be a cloud-based game system like OnLive.
Thankfully, that speculation was incorrect, and the realization of that partnership is even better than we could have imagined. It seems that rather than using Gaikai’s technology solely for game streaming, Sony will instead focus that technology on streamlining the download and play process for gamers, thus addressing one of the largest and longest running complaints about the PS3: constant and frustratingly slow updates.
Sony will combine Gaikai’s streaming tech with something that has never been conceived on a console: internal hardware dedicated solely to managing downloads. In the past, in virtually all digital spaces, the management of background downloading, multiple downloads, or updates to software has been limited to software-side solutions. This would always require the software to set aside chunks of processor real-estate to handle the downloads, and while there have been a few decent PC implementations, it’s never really been done properly. With internal hardware dedicated to the task, gamers will never have to wait for a download to play a game, and background downloads will rarely – if ever – need to be paused in order to accommodate gameplay.
Combine this hardware solution with Gaikai’s streaming tech, and you have an absolute nirvana for gamers: a system that will allow you to download everything in the background regardless of what you’re doing on the console at the time, will let you stream content from the server while you’re waiting for a game to download, and will download and install any and all updates automatically.
Never again will you put a game disc into your console and have to wait for an hour for the most recent updates to download and install. Never again will you purchase a digital title and have to wait for it to download before you can begin playing. Never again will you turn on your system and wait for an interminable system update before you can begin playing.
This set of features, if executed properly, could be one of the best things to come out of console gaming in years. It also proves that not only was Sony listening intently to their fans and detractors, but they took their solution to one of the strongest complaints of this generation a step further than many of us even knew was possible. It bodes well for Sony’s standing in the next round of the “console wars”, which is good news for long-time Playstation hardcores like me.
