Intrinsic said:
- No doubt PS division lost billions thanks to the high costs of manufacturing a PS3. But from 2009 when they righted that ship they had been profitable till 2013 when the PS4 released. Any gaming company posts losses on the year of a new console release. As for your marketing the simple fact is that they aren't doing anything you are saying. They aren't marketing PSnow as if they expect people to pick it up cause its not only in a beta, but even sony has said they have to be cautious and slow with its implementation as to get things right. So don't know where you are getting your information.
And you still talk about emulation but fail to point out any kinda of PC rig on the planet that is currently able to emulate PS3/PS4 games so again I don't see how its relevant. And again, you seem to look at PSnow like its some essential killer app service, it isn't... its primarily about options. I understand that PSnow still has tons of technical hurdles to overcome, but again, thats why its in beta. And from how sony is pushing it, it may very well be in beta for the next 2 years.
- Input lag is n issue no doubt, and yes it will be interesting to see how it pans out; I have no clue how it will be causeI have not seen the service in action and how good or bad it could be. I do not that a few people have an internet connection capabl of running things like that, and ultimately... barring your internet connection input lag can technically be brought down to standard online multiplayer levels. That is a technical possibility.
And no, a video streaming service (interactive or not) has more in common to a game streaming service with the only difference being that you also send or recieve controller inputs than reading a book.
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1.) They lost many billions, and they have yet to recoup the actual losses despite having been in the positive in recent years. Sony as a whole is still in the red. Its not really a thing about posting losses, which is in general a true thing on release on new tech, its about how much Sony lost from the PS3 which was, bar none, a complete financial disaster. If the rest of Sony hadn't been around to pick up the slack, the PS division would have ceased to exist from such a debackle. Anyway, that's all I was referring to, the company as a whole is in financial dire straights and this is a service which is going to push on their already low funds. Even if you thik they are marketing it as a niche thing, which I genuinely do not believe at all (but it'd be best to let this go until we see more from Sony in the coming months), then maybe it is not as big a financial sink as I believe it to be. We'll see.
No one has sat down to make a PS4/X1 emulator yet, that doesn't happen until usually someone leaks the internal development environment. The PS3 is quite difficult to emulate indeed because you'd have to emulate the PPC hardware. But I was more referring to emulating everything else that is already available, and, if you're in such dire needs of the PS3 catalog, to just buy a PS3. You'd save fist fulls of money AND have a better gaming experience over PSNow. Some technical hurdles are not going to be overcome, its never going to look all that good because it is a streaming service and one that cannot be "pre-buffered" like Netflix. You cannot buffer interactive so either you need to consume vast amounts of data bandwidth to stream at high fidelity or you're going to be streaming at qualities that make the PS2 look good.
2.) Multiplayer doesn't have input lag because your machine is right there and takes the inputs immediately, multiplayer has bigger and very common issues of server desyncs and lag... which no one likes. These are usually easier to fix by getting better server bandwidth and/or more servers. In the case of Share Play, you're not giving commands to "right here" ever, its always signal being sent, received, sorted, sent out again, and then finally shown on screen. Unless Sony has wizards working for them, I do not see "smooth" being a descriptor of the experience.
The only difference? How about that Netflix can actually send packets of data pre-emptively and buffer it out behind the scenes? Gaming cannot do such a thing. Netflix and reading a book are more incommon than gaming is with either when it comes to streaming.
