SharePlay is an amazing feature, that essentially lets you digitally share your game library with another player who owns a PlayStation 4 via internet streaming. Obviously, it comes with some restrictions (a cap of 720p and 30FPS), but honestly, that’s a very small price to pay for what is such a cool feature.

Unless you live in Germany, that is, where this feature seems to be substantially less cool. You see, German players are only allowed to SharePlay with other players from Germany. What this means is that you can’t play, or let another user play, games unless all parties involved are German (assuming you live in Germany).

Given Germany’s stronger censorship laws for video games, it makes sense, but still, it’s a bit of a bummer. It’s also a little scummy of Sony to not have actually come out in the open and made this very clear beforehand. But hey, it’s a free service, it works as promised, and if German PS4 players want to get mad at someone about this situation, Sony is probably not who they are looking for.

The PlayStation 4 has hedged its bets on making gaming a social experience. It lets you share your greatest gaming moments via screenshots and videos. It lets you livestream your game sessions over Twitch and uStream. It comes built in with a wide plethora of tools for users to customize how they share their games with others. And now, SharePlay lets people share their entire game libraries with their friends via game streaming. It’s actually pretty neat.

The newest Japanese ad for the PlayStation 4 celebrates this emphasis the console has on sharing, and on making gaming a social experience. Considering how multiplayer- both local or online- has always traditionally been a weak spot for PlayStation consoles, it’s actually good to see Sony highlight the PS4’s relative strengths in this area.

However, whether or not it does anything for the console’s flagging sales in Japan, where there is a completely different market dynamic entirely, remains to be seen.

Sony is revealing some more information on PS4 SharePlay, a rather interesting feature coming in system update 2.0 that lets you remotely play single-player games on a friend’s console or join them in a multiplayer game.

According to GameSpot, SharePlay sessions will only last for an hour. You can start a new session and resume progress – which is possible since you can save game data on your own PS4 – but you’ll still have to deal with the pain of being interrupted one hour in. For some games like Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, which require a good solid hour (at least) for raids, it can be highly inconvenient.

Regardless, just about any DualShock 4 game will be supported by SharePlay which gives you a wide range of titles to try out. SharePlay will be out later this year – are you looking forward to it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

One of the best features that Yoshida announced would be coming over to the PlayStation 4 with the upcoming 2.00 firmware update was SharePlay. Which, if you don’t know what it is, allows you to remotely share your PS4 and any games on it with a friend. Potentially, what this means is, you can share your games with someone remotely over the internet as long as they too have a PS4 to stream your library too.

it’s a very neat feature, and should certainly earn Sony some goodwill. Speaking to Famitsu, Yoshida explained exactly how it works:

“How it works is, for example, say, a friend has a game that I don’t. I ask them to let me play it, and if they send me an invitation, I can access their PS4 and play while watching the video that is streamed,” said Yoshida. “You could call it a mini PlayStation Now.”

That’s pretty simple, really. He goes on to explain, however, that SharePlay is only compatible with DualShock 4 games- so stuff like The Playroom, for example, won’t be compatible. On the flip side, he promises that as long as a game is compatible with DualShock 4, it will automatically be compatible with SharePlay, without any patching or special effort needed on the developer’s part.

Another caveat is, while someone is sharing your PlayStation 4 via SharePlay, they basically have it hijacked. You can’t use it while they use it, without kicking them out. The flipside of that, however, is that SharePlay can make it easy to replicate same room couch-op experiences.

Really, this is a remarkable and progressive feature, and Sony deserves full credit for it.