Let’s talk about PS Now- the Gaikai powered games streaming service was originally announced as a method to introduce universal backwards compatibility to the PS4, which, with its x86 based architecture, otherwise completely lacked a way to play these older PlayStation games. Over time, the service seems to have contracted in scope, and currently just covers PS3 games, with Sony dodging questions about PS2 and PS1 games ever coming to it.
Nevertheless, as a service meant to play PS3 games on PS4 (and PS Vita, Sony TVs, smartphones, tablets, and, yes, PS3 itself), it actually works pretty well. The video above comes from our friends at Polygon, and it shows us just how good Sony’s infrastructure for this service really is. Yes, the game takes about 40 seconds to load up, which can seem a little obsessive, and there is definitely some minor sound skipping, but on the whole, the latency is shockingly low, and once the game does start, you might as well be playing on a PS3 natively.
The issues with PS Now are not, and were never, with the infrastructure- they have more to do with how it is structured, namely, in that it is priced per rental (with eye gougingly exorbitant prices), instead of going for a subscription based model, like, say, EA did. Those are issues that can, thankfully, be resolved as time goes on. Sony has already promised a subscription based model coming later. As it stands now, though, we can at least rest assured that the framework of the service itself is sound.
Thanks, Polygon
