Yoshida Sheds More Light on How SharePlay Works

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.