PS4 Won't Require A Constant Internet Connection

[MeChaNiZ3D]

This is getting better and better. All I need now is an article stating it will be a measy $2 and will come with a complimentary Monster Hunter game.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Hah. Low-power mode that can download things in the background? Where have I heard that before? Oh. That's right. Wii Connect 24... XD

Funnily enough the Wii U dropped that feature, even though it breaks backwards compatibility slightly to remove it...

Still, Connect 24 was pretty useless, which isn't a huge surprise because the Wii's online support just wasn't all that useful. The list of features that are broken on Wii games when running on a Wii U though did surprise me when I went trough my game collection. (The weirdest by far being the loss of the ability to save screenshots in Smash Brothers.)

Oh well. Here's hoping a feature like this does the PS4 more good than it did the Wii...

 

[Strazdas]

Im not anti-social, i just want to play my games alone.
well ok, im anti-social, but not because games.
and i did play 27 hours with 3 friends teamworking in a simulator hosted on friends house this weekend, though i was mostly "this is my train line go get your own".

Seeing as how you'll need a connection to stream PS1/2/3 games through their Gaikai service, this is a rather meaningless victory.

Just feels like Sony's saying this: "No, we're not forcing you to always be online! We're just forcing you to use our online streaming service to play all of your classic favorites from our older consoles. If you don't want any access to any games except your PS4 games, you can totally stay offline, you anti-social nerd!"

well you have to be online to use online services. makes sense, no? the reason for backward compactability lack is obvious and they should be applauded on taking a step towards maknig the console better than living 10 years ago.

 

[Strazdas]

well you have to be online to use online services. makes sense, no? the reason for backward compactability lack is obvious and they should be applauded on taking a step towards maknig the console better than living 10 years ago.

Correction: you need to be online in order to play ANY games that aren't on the PS4. I don't care about any of Sony's stupid online services, I just expect my game console to play games. And it can't even do that right.

And as Jim already pointed out, the backwards compatibility "issue" is clearly a load of bunk when the Vita (which is completely compatible with the PS4's hardware) can play several of these classic games through the software of the Playstation Network. Yet the PS4 can't even do *that*. You *have* to rely on Gaikai to stream these games for you if you want to play them, which means you may end up rebuying every single game you own just to be able to play it on the PS4.

There's no excuse for that.

by playing a game that is not on a PS4 (meaning its on a cloud[/b]online service[/b]) you have to be conencted to internet. in other words, using internet to use online services. how is that incorrect i cant understand.
it plays games, PS4 plays PS4 games. kinda obviuos when you think about it. If you want to play PS3 games, use PS3 (dont buy PS4). who is forcing you to buy it?
I do not know what vita can and cant do as i kidna shuffled to "not interested in handhelds" section, but if it can play PS3 games without heavy emulation (and thats unlikely considering its handheld) then it must have a cell based structure, which would make sense of why PS4 cant play Vita games either.
Now the need to re-buy game on Gaikai vs using the PS3 version and sign it with Gaikai is a different issue, and its one that i can fully get behind. But its not like you could have played it there before PS4 either, now could you? so what did you actually loose?
Backward compactability is a feature that is loudly requested, but in reality hardly ever used. Research shows that around 1-2% of gamers ever use it, so id rather see them put resoruces toward developing features that 90% of gamers use trather than make very complex emulation of completely different architecture platform that barely anyone is going to use anyway.
If you would use it, you are an exception, and sadly us, exceptions have to just harden the fuck up and deal with it.

 

[Strazdas]

No one. But they're doing a poor job selling the console to me.

That may be true, but you aren't the target audience. target audience, the majority of gamers, are ones that have internet connected most of the time anyway. this is 2013, everyone and his grandma has internet now.

Er, the PS4 and Vita utilize a new breed of Cross-Play, similar to how the PS3 and Vita did. They are perfectly compatible devices. Which only lends more credence to the notion that it's not technologically impossible, it's just them trying to force their streaming service on their customers so that the money they spent on Gaikai isn't a total waste.

you cant be compactible with both PS3 and PS4. architecture differences dont allow it. They provide service X without providing service Y. you complain beucase you want them to provide service Y. they have no obligation.

They could easily make the console backwards compatible. It would just cost significantly more. They're not doing this because it's impossible, they're doing it because it's cheaper.

yeah, and have another giant loss and no developers except few braves ones wanting to use horrible architecture? id rather they learn from the mistake and move on.

Problem is, their direct competitor (Wii U) has backwards compatibility in terms of both its hardware (the peripherals) and also its software (games), and costs approximately the same amount.

Lets face it, wii caters different audience than SONY. some fans overlap, but its not like one going better is going to ruin the other. Xbox would be a better comparison for competition, and they are doing piss-poor job on compactability.

So the Wii U is starting off with a much better library of games than the PS4 is. Hell, the PS3 is in better shape to sell than the PS4 simply because of that library issue, since most of the games advertised during the conference are also available on PS3. So why, again, would I bother with a PS4?

that is true and this is why i dont suggest anyone buying PS4 at the begining but rather wait for some more games to come out. they need very strong launch titles to sell well at first, but sony has proven that they are willing to play the long game.

Those sound like made up statistics. Source?

I think i heard those nubmers in the podcast of escapist, but there are plenty of research on this, like http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1599673

 

[Strazdas]

That's not true at all, as previous failures in this industry have shown. So far the only game to successfully market itself as Always-Online and still sell well is Blizzard's Diablo 3, and that's mainly because its devs could pretty much place dog turds in a box and still sell it to their customers.

Oh, i dont like always online as much as anyone else, in fact i stopped buying AC games for the sole purpose of thier always online creating more problems for costumers than for pirates. but to say that no game can be sucesful with always online is ridiculous. we already have TONS of games like these, they are called MMOs and online shooters/brawlers, MOBAs. there are more people playing online than offline at any given moment.

Again, this is patently false. They *can* be backwards compatible but it's not cheap.

it is impossible for a handeld like vita. if you want to put such emulation whether software or hardware it wont really be a thing you can carry in your pocket anymore. you can do a local emulation, and yes its not cheap, however considering SONY already lost money on console sales last time, they dont want to add even more to a price for a feature hardly anyone use anyway.

The Wii got around this problem by basically designing a separate input and delivery system for the GCN hardware, so the the console could still read the disc fine but it swapped over to the GCN hardware to play the game. And yet despite this, the Wii was still cheaper than its competitors, primarily because the hardware was lower in spec.

The Wii didnt had the problem of PS3 architecture to begin with. You can swap PC hardware and still have backward compactability. not so easy with cell based PS3s. apples and oranges.

No one hated the PS3's architecture, and they've had tons of developer support since the creation of the console. You're spinning a narrative that simply isn't true. >_>

yet every developer except maybe naughty dog were cryin about PS3 limitations due to architecture and how their games on PS3 need a completely recode to not be buggy due to PS3s unique design....

Er, Microsoft hasn't even announced its console yet, so how can you make that claim?

by comparing their already released product backward compactabilities?

They're not going to sell well. The Wii U's sales are actually rather poor and yet it offers a much better experience than the PS4 promises to offer.

Tastes differ, ill give you that, but Wii U offer me an experience of wanting to personally find someone who invented it and rip its head off. just becuase you like it more does not mean everyone else will. i wont predict Wii U failure though, as i already tried that with Wii, and what do i know, there are too many people that watn to destroy thier home while gaming it seems.

The Wii U has more exclusive titles (the PS4 has exactly two named exclusives), it integrates the second screen technology with its console rather than expecting people to buy two separate hundred-dollar devices to perform this task, and it's backwards compatible.

and you want to need to look at 2 screens at one time why? sure its barkwards compactible, since its laready runing a 7 year old hardware.

The only way Sony's console can hope to sell is if it sells for less than the Wii U, and I'm relatively certain that it won't.

or, you know, actually be a better console for certain demographic. you do know that graphics are the second coming of christ to some people right? for those people, sony is the church they go to.

And Sony's not playing "the long game", their typical strategy is to play the "sell the console at a loss and hope that game sales recoup costs" game.

Everyone does that at the beginning of consoles lifecycle with exception being the Wii (wiiU also sells at a loss sometimes).

And that will kill them if they try it this gen, because most of their PS4 titles are sold on the PS3 as well. They should have learned this lesson back when the PS3 came out and PS2 sales were butchering it because the console was cheaper and still offered most of the same games.

oh no, more games are coming otu for a console that is out rather than one that is not evne out yet. what a shock. give it a year and then see how many games will be coming to PS3. Noone develops for PS2 anymore you know.

I asked for a direct quote of statistics, not a link to a research paper you spent 10 minutes looking up on Google using "backwards compatibility" as a search term.

If they're as numerous as you claim, then it shouldn't be hard for you to do this.

if you somehow managed to use your psychic ability and determine how i find my links then you should be able to use that same ability to find this information. sorry, i dont hold a repository of links for everything i ever read on the internet.

 

[Strazdas]

Oh, i dont like always online as much as anyone else, in fact i stopped buying AC games for the sole purpose of thier always online creating more problems for costumers than for pirates. but to say that no game can be sucesful with always online is ridiculous. we already have TONS of games like these, they are called MMOs and online shooters/brawlers, MOBAs. there are more people playing online than offline at any given moment.

I didn't say that no game can be successful with Always On DRM, in fact I pointed out an example where it worked. But other companies don't have the brand trust that Blizzard has. Ubisoft has tried it on several games and those games didn't sell as well as they were expected. This isn't some obscure thing, it's a well known fact of the industry that Always On DRM haven't tended to sell as well as games that lacked such "anti-piracy" measures.

The lack of Ubisoft success was two-sided. from one side, they provided a piss-poor service, meaning that for half the people the game didn't even run at all because servers were crashing. this brought al ot of bad press. another is that they were one of the first ones to do it, and early adopters always have to hit a few bumps before things get ironed out, in this case, public outlash.
take GTA4 for example, it had the Game For Windows Live always on DRM (well you had to be online at the start of game and saves were saved online but it was possible to set them to mirror offline, still you couldnt save the game if your offline, but you could play it) and it sold well. those games arent that rare. and nice way to totaly ignore all other numeriuso examples i gave and continue claiming that only oen game suceeded.

We're not talking about the Vita, we're talking about the PS4.

strange, and here i though you said VITA had similar design to PS4 and emulated PS3 games. guess something got lost in translation.

And it's not impossible for the Vita either. The Vita plays a number of PS3 games just fine, and has Cross Play functionality for both the PS3 and PS4. People need to stop repeating "it's the architecture" because I'm beginning to think they don't know what architecture even means with regards to an electrical system. It's got shit to do with the "architecture", because if it was truly an architectural problem, the console wouldn't be able to play those games at all.

but if there was ever a case for architectural problem in consoles it is the PS3 case. it was unique, sonys attempt to be "Different" that didnt work. they tried, i like that, but it didnt work the way it should have. trust me, i defended my share of PS3 in the past, but it simply is built different. you can play games on VITA that are either emulated (software since vita dont have space for PS3 hardware) and likely the emulation takes mosto f the power or are same game with two codes, that is, a game coded for PS3 and recoded for VIta. this is nto as far feched as you may thing, as some games released on PC and Xobx had to be significantly recoded for PS3.

They both use very similar optical disc drives. I'm betting that PS3 games call and allocate resources differently than PS4 games, or that the optical disc drives are built to read PS4 discs differently than PS3 discs (possibly a side effect of the jump to Blu-Ray technology). But in even if that's the case, the fact that the console can still play PS3 games through online streaming *proves* that the console can play those types of games. But they left that hardware out for two reasons.

same disc. different commands. lets say you start a PS3 game, it wants to load a map, it asks the PS4 to put the tectures into this cluster of ram. oh wait, there is no such cluster of ram, as PS4 is different. error error system crashed. now what to do to avoid that is to make a software in background that catches that command and redirects that to correct location. problem in this case is that PS3 is so different that such program would take a significant amount of time needed to code and significant resources to run. granted if PS4 is as powerful as they claim it should be able to run it. but are you willing to pay 100 more to cover the developement costs?
For the stream service, i imagine it is something like On-Live. you dont actually run the game, you got video streamed to you and you send out the controller commands. the game runs on thier servers, likely on a virtual PS3 (or possibly even real PS3 with games sit firmly in the HDD if they didnt create the emulator). all your PS4 does is recieve VIDEO stream and send out commands from the key. sort of like playing a browser based game. this avoids the need for local game emulation that they seem to have problem with.

1) Sony wanted to cut costs, because selling the PS3 at a loss last generation cost them dearly in terms of revenue.
2) Sony wanted to make its purchase of Gaikai into a worthwhile investment.

and both of those are fair and reasonable reasons and i doubt you would be willing to pay 100 dollar more for the console if the only difference would be a local buggy emulation of PS3 (bugs may be ironed out in, say, 3 years or so, but first emulation is surely to be buggy).

Again, the Wii did it, and that console was sold at a profit, but that's because the Wii uses low-spec hardware.

yes, exactly, wii uses the low-specs and thus it is cheap to make. it caters to certain audience, one that SONY isnt going for, they are and were going for the "I WANT MAH POWERFUL GAME ON MAX ULTRA GRAPHICS" audience. and theres nothing wrong with that. if your not that audience dont buy the console, its not for you.

Their "architecture" is very similar, but the console would be utterly incapable of playing GCN games if it hadn't received several hardware upgrades specifically designed to allow for GCN compatibility.

Thats the thing, PS4 and PS3 isnt. you need more than a several hardware upgrades, you need to build in a second console inside the box if you want to do hardware emulation. and you dont want to buy the PS3 with PS4 together when you already have PS3.

So by making assumptions? Mkay, just thought that needed to be established.

i said that Microsoft had shitty backward comapctability. it is true, the Xbox bacward compactability on 360 was shitty. i wasnt talking about the next console.

Ah yes, the old "Nintendo is ruining gaming" argument....that hasn't gotten stale at all.

Not at all. i dont think nintendo ruined the gaming. i think they took it into a direction i, personally, hate. But they have their costumers, and i wont be one of them.

Then why is Sony making a big selling point out of its Cross-Play compatibility with the PS Vita?

Oh, right, because Sony can't come up with any of its own ideas, as the Sony Wiimote....er, sorry, the "Move" clearly shows.

i dont know, why? maybe because it seems that majority of gamers want that? i know i dont.
companies in ALL industries have been tryign to copy eachothers sucess for ages. this is nothing new.

No, people who whine about graphics that much are the ones who buy PC.

hah, you must not remember the xbox vs PS3 graphics wars when those two launched.....

And that's the problem: who is going to buy a new console in this economy for its "potential" value?

i dont think we have enough fingers to count these people. trust me, people are richer than they act.

As the Wii U, PS Vita, and 3DS show, that isn't working very well any more. Eventually the idiots creating these consoles need to learn that lesson.

very good, i really want the "buy now get games in 3 years" to stop. however gaming industry seems to have a lot of blind fanboyism and early adopters still. dont think its going to be this generation that kills this tactic yet. Besides, there is always the PC where you have potentian AND a backcatalogue.

Then don't make up fake statistics to try and make a point. It's perfectly acceptable for me to call you out on stats you can't back up.

fair enough, you have the high ground here.

Cpacha:hit the sack
Im tellign you, capcha is skynet....