News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

Status
Not open for further replies.
Instead of $30 for 90 days, they should say $30 for 100 hours of gameplay that is accessible over next 6 months.

Yes, or a mix of those 2 ideas. 90 days or 100 hours of gameplay depending of the hours played.

If you don't play a lot everyday you'll get 90 days but the subscription will end if you reach 100 hours before the 90 days. Seems fair for both parties.
 
You know... I don't relish the idea of re-renting the games I've already got sitting on my shelf right here at home. It feels wrong, and I think it is wrong. I hope it won't come to this, because I'm just not going to do it.

It would have been cool if Sony had made a "Gaikai for the home" for us who own both consoles, the PS3 streaming to the PS4 straight over my home network, but of course they would want to "monetize" backwards compatibility instead for more $$$ in their pocket, so...meh.
 
We'll see what kind of PS Plus / Subscription models they have. As long as there's a Spotify/Netflix style, it may work out ...
 
It would have been cool if Sony had made a "Gaikai for the home" for us who own both consoles, the PS3 streaming to the PS4 straight over my home network, but of course they would want to "monetize" backwards compatibility instead for more $$$ in their pocket, so...meh.

Considering PS3 needs an external add-on device for hdmi streaming, there may be some money to be made, but the volume of demand for such a product is highly questionable. There is some practical value for to-tablet or to-vita streaming with an addon, but now that PS4 is out with built in remote play, I think the right thing to do for Sony is just enable non vita remoteplay at some point.
 
Load times will still be there unless they use some mythical technology for storage on their servers.

I'm not talking about the current PS Now platform. A server platform purpose built from the ground up wouldn't be dependent on mechanical drives, or even SSDs. Games could be loaded from RAM drives, or each server could have so much RAM the whole game fits in memory. You won't be waiting for games to launch, you'll be connected seamlessly to a server that already has the game you chose running. Load balancing where servers are shifted from one game to another will happen invisibly with no exposure to users. The closest analog would be an arcade.
 
Considering PS3 needs an external add-on device for hdmi streaming, there may be some money to be made, but the volume of demand for such a product is highly questionable.
I'm not talking about any hardware addon, but rather copying PS3 framebuffer to XDR and compressing it on the console, then send out the networking (likely meaning GbE port, since all PS3 models lack 5GHz wifi IIRC. ...PS4 also for that matter btw.)
 
I'm not talking about any hardware addon, but rather copying PS3 framebuffer to XDR and compressing it on the console, then send out the networking (likely meaning GbE port, since all PS3 models lack 5GHz wifi IIRC. ...PS4 also for that matter btw.)

Right. You're describing RemotePlay. The problem is PS3s don't have hardware h.264 encoders built in so they have to do it in software on Cell. There were only a few games that supported this for RemotePlay to PSP and Vita, presumably because most didn't want to sacrifice the CPU time.
 
You don't need to go full monty and do h264 via gigabit LAN, you could settle with a cheaper algorithm, MPEG2 maybe.
 
Right. You're describing RemotePlay. The problem is PS3s don't have hardware h.264 encoders built in so they have to do it in software on Cell. There were only a few games that supported this for RemotePlay to PSP and Vita, presumably because most didn't want to sacrifice the CPU time.

with a hacked PS3, you could enable remote play for every single title ever released on the platform, even the most demanding ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbR9JY9PtQ0


I am sure there are some performance drops, because I doubt the remote play-encoding was a locked hardware power reserve, but it looks like the performance drop is almost unnoticeable at least with The Last of US
 
People with hacked consoles are always saying how the performance of this or that enabled feature was fine, but they rarely seem to have done more than spot-check the first 30 minutes of a game.
 
with a hacked PS3, you could enable remote play for every single title ever released on the platform, even the most demanding ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbR9JY9PtQ0


I am sure there are some performance drops, because I doubt the remote play-encoding was a locked hardware power reserve, but it looks like the performance drop is almost unnoticeable at least with The Last of US

I think with remote play and PSP the controls have been an issue first and foremost, but licence issues may have played a part here and there too.

For the Vita, the controls are much more manageable, as the Vita has everything (including a gyroscope and camera even) except clickable L3+R2, and the L2 and R2 buttons, which can be reasonably well compensated with the touch screens front and back. and even then it's sometimes a bit of a challenge.

The PSP only had one analog stick, no tilt, no 2 and 3 buttons, and nothing else to compensate.
 
People with hacked consoles are always saying how the performance of this or that enabled feature was fine, but they rarely seem to have done more than spot-check the first 30 minutes of a game.

It was probably handled by the reserved SPE, so I wouldn't be surprised if the PS3 system reserve (SPE and memory) was indeed capable of allowing remote play on every game, without significantly affecting game performance (if at all).
 
with a hacked PS3, you could enable remote play for every single title ever released on the platform, even the most demanding ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbR9JY9PtQ0


I am sure there are some performance drops, because I doubt the remote play-encoding was a locked hardware power reserve, but it looks like the performance drop is almost unnoticeable at least with The Last of US

Yes its working fine, no noticeable performance drop after force enable the remoteplay.

btw the remove of black bars on Beyond Two Souls also give no drop.
 
Forced Remote Play on various PS3 titles DO introduces slowdowns and problems [SPUs are doing the video encoding, and some games dont want to give that processing time away].

Removal of black bars in Beyond Two Souls mostly gives good framerate, with rare drops to low 20s in some scenes.
 
Sorry but a 4 hour rental makes a lot of sense.
I have bought many games I thought I'd love but which, it turns out, were not games I'd want to play for more than a couple of hours, let alone finish. $5 for what is essentially a 4 hour demo is nothing.
IF there is a possibility to play the game for 4 hours and then 'upgrade' to 7 days by paying just the $3 extra, if the game is actually interesting enough to finish, then this whole thing makes a lot of sense.

I'm not exactly sure why people are getting offended by the 4 hour option so much.
It's not as if you're not offered other options...

Apart from the 4 hour option (which has its merits in certain circumstances) the rest of the prices seem reasonable.

7 days 8 USD, about $1.15 a day
30 days 15 USD, about $.50 a day
90 days 30 USD, about $.33 a day.

Last checked red box charges $2 a day so I'm not sure why some of you are raging over the 4 hour option. Ignore it and move on, the other 3 prices look reasonable.
It would be nice if they allow you to upgrade your rental mid-way though, like if I played through the 5th day under the 7 day rental, I could get an additional 23 days for 7 USD.



I got invited to the private beta. Haven't jumped in yet.

How does the selection look ? Day-and-date or old catalog PS3 games ?


I still think that offering this service to iOS folks make the most sense. They don't have access to Playstation games to begin with.
Sony can price it at that level (or higher) and it would be a new adventure to iOS users.
 
Ooooh, I'm just not sold on the whole PlayStation Now premise. I don't want to play these old games through a laggy stream and not for these prices. And all at the same time, I'm not sure why I should pay for the games I bought and own anyway. Sure, I get to play it on a PS4 instead of having to bring out my old console, but I'm not sure those prices justify the means. Which was exactly the point half a year ago (probably somewhere in a post of mine hidden in this very topic).

Cloud servers cost money. A lot of it. And at the same time, the quality of the service is dependant on how efficient the content can be streamed and how high the latency is. At the end of the day, I'm just not convinced such a service can be offered to the broad public at a profit. IMO - (and I hope not), I think Now will go down as a huge flop and waste of money/resources eventually.
 
I think the opposite. The price/power scales down over time whereas a game is a fixed quantity. So while I think new PS4 games and some of the exclusive PS3 games may pose some trouble initially (relatively expensive) especially all titles that already ran on PC in some form will scale down to run very efficiently. Think about smartphones and tablets, and the types of games they can run vs the lower they can use, and you get a decent sense of how many clients a dedicated hosting device could potentially serve.

Of course, all these games could have just been ported as well, but there comes a point where if you have a few thousand games available like this, a subscription service will become more efficient.

Also the other day I was thinking about getting something like Final Fantasy on Vita, but the idea that I'd have to clean out 7GB of data alone ...

Also I tried both Gaikai and OnLive (was that its name?) and the quality was really good.
 
My point isn't necessarely that the power required to emulate this game doesn't scale. I know it does. But the whole infrastructure costs money and is a relatively fixed cost. The only difference is if you can emulate 10 games on your farm or 10'000 simulatenously. That's a given.

My concern is rather with the fact that you have high fixed costs - and for it to return a profit, you need N number of consumers willing to spend money on it. Without consumers and the demand, no profits.

Similar to the arguments in the earlier Microsoft Cloud debates (before they effectively ditched the always online plan), latency and bandwidth is crucial for online gaming/streaming. Don't get that right, and the whole demand falls apart, because no one is willing to play a game that effectively doesn't work and play well. Bandwidth may not be a problem for the most consumers - it is latency.

In order to tackle latency, you need multiple server farms / "clouds" - best-case, as close to the consumer as you can get. This costs even more money. You can't have one central server accross Oceania and supply it for everyone on this planet from there. Latency won't be good enough.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The problem with MS online plan is that it affects everyone, thus the outrage. For some people, any game that is latency sensitive is automatically from their consideration because the infrastructure is not up to the task. Sony doesn't force people to use PS Now. It's up to the people to test (I hope Sony have a way for people to test their connection) and use the service.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top