Sources speaking to Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson revealed that the feature has been in development and testing for months as “Cronus.” It’s reportedly coming to PlayStation Plus Premium, which costs $17.99. Furthermore, a public beta for update 7.00 is allegedly beginning in the “coming days” and will conclude on January 30th, but test testers reportedly won’t have full access to Discord integration.

Sony hasn’t officially commented on PS5 game streaming via the cloud. At present, PlayStation Plus Premium only offers cloud streaming for PlayStation One, PS2, PS3, and PlayStation Portable games (that too with restrictions in certain countries). Nevertheless, with Xbox pushing for cloud streaming of Xbox Series X/S titles across various platforms through Game Pass, it makes sense for Sony to pursue the same.

Stay tuned for more details in the coming days.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has criticized Sony’s plans for PlayStation Now before but now he argues that the company won’t be able to afford content streaming on their upcoming Cloud-based service.

As Pachter states on the latest episode of GT’s Bonus Round, publishers won’t offer their content on a subscription-based service so easily since they risk losing out on sales on a per retail copy basis.

“The math doesn’t make sense for the content owners. If the math doesn’t make sense for the content owners, it isn’t gonna happen. So, the lower the subscrition price, the less likely this thing will work. If it’s a thirty dollars subscription price, which the publishers will embrace, then no one’s gonna sign up.”

Pachter also compared Sony’s model to Netflix which has branched out into original content in the past few years. “I don’t think you could make it work. Netflix is the anomaly.The low price subscription plan with tons and tons of content…They did a bunch of really clever deals early on to make that happen, and then they got big enough that they can afford to pay. Sony’s not big enough to afford to pay that kind of dollars. They don’t have that much money.”

Currently, PS Now is in the beta testing stage and will go live in the Summer for PS4.

Though the industry has been relatively upbeat about PlayStation Now, Sony’s Cloud-based game streaming service for delivering PS3 games to the PS4, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter is sufficiently less optimistic.

Speaking in the March 2014 issue of Game Informer, Pachter said that, “PlayStation Now is a joke. There is no publisher that is going to license content that’s less than two-years old because they would be concerned that they can’t sell as many copies if they make it available for subscription or rental. This has no prayer of working. None.”

Suffice to say, he’s not a fan.

SCEA marketing VP John Koller feels otherwise and says that “publishers are being exceedingly bullish” about the service. As of now, Sony has only announced first party titles for the platform – no third party games have been confirmed for the service, which launches this Summer. Do you agree with Pachter’s stance? Let us know below.

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“This really is quite a difficult problem to solve. I can give a little insight of two ways I know of to implement backward compatibility for current gen and past gen gaming consoles (PS1, PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox 360).

“The first method involves building server farms of gaming consoles. For Microsoft, this would mean linking up racks and racks of Xbox 360s. Whenever a user requests a game, content would be generated by a console, then streamed. The bulk of the cost of this approach would be the cost of obtaining and setting up these consoles. In addition, maintenance cost of infrastructure that streams content via the internet needs to be accounted for. The upside is we already have all the hardware we need, the PS3 and 360 are released products.

“A second method would be emulation. The benefit of this is scalability. Several instances of a console could be emulated per server. This is possible and already achieved for older generation consoles such as PS1, PS2, and the original Xbox. A complete and working PS3 or Xbox 360 emulator is more or less impossible given the current state of technology. The overall consensus on when we would have the processing power to emulate a Cell processor or the 360’s PowerPC triple core processor is about ten years.

“The second approach will most likely be used for older generation games and the first method as a viable solution for PS3 and Xbox 360 games. However, even if these methods are technologically feasible, there are still many issues to solve. An obvious one is latency. There exists several sources of latency, the speed at which content can be generated (quality of infrastructure), the speed at which content can be received (your internet speed), as well as lag due to controller inputs, TVs, etc….

“Assume we are able to reduce latency to the point where games are playable and users can see no visible lag, how many clients can we serve concurrently? Assume again that for one user to stream a game, one console is required and is locked for the duration of gameplay. How many consoles would we need such that every user at any given time who requests a game session will have an available console. 10,000? 100,000? A million? Would users have to wait in line to play a game? I would think these are the harder questions to answer.

“It really would be interesting to see Gaikai’s solution to these issues. In my opinion, showing one or two instances of lag free remote streaming gameplay is great but not really worthy of mentioning.”

He also advised against picking up an Xbox One from Target, which is reportedly shipping the consoles early. “I would advise no one to buy this. 1) Could be a scam. 2) He blotted out S/N but the barcode is still there. I’ve already saved and scanned it. 3) This console will be banned soon, if it was stolen or from the Beta.” Considering the controversy that’s followed, that might be for the best.

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know below.

“Yes, I think Sony is using a very methodical approach to the cloud implementing capabilities slowly. Eventually I think this will lead to PS4 games being included.”

She also spoke about consoles in the far-flung future, addressing certain views such as Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada’s comments that Sony’s next console [PS5] after the PS4 would be a cloud-based service rather than a physical device.

“There is merit to that concept. There has to be something that is provided in a console that cannot be provided in a service based in the cloud. That could be many different things and eight years from now it is hard to say what that might be. Things that come to mind are interface technologies, such as augmented reality, or display concepts such as virtual reality.

“For the last few cycles the focus has been on graphics capabilities, this time around it is on interface, media services, and multi-screen access. Even if Microsoft and Sony move to cloud based services it isn’t inconceivable that another hardware make could come along with new capabilities and launch a new console in the market.”

The PlayStation 4, meanwhile, will be releasing on November 15th in North America and November 29th in Europe. Stay tuned for more news on Gaikai and cloud gaming on consoles in the coming months.