The future of gaming will be spread across multiple devices with portability becoming an increasingly important factor, Sony has suggested at the PS4 launch event.
Bring a raft of new online, social and portable gaming capabilities to its newly unveiled PS4 console, Sony has suggested that, thanks in part to the recent rise in smartphone and tablet based casual gaming, the gaming industry is being forced to reassess its foundations which were built around a selection of single-purpose devices.
“At a time of great transition in technology and how we use it, every major console all the way from the Atari 2600 all the way up to the PlayStation 2 had pretty much been a single-purpose device,” Mark Cerny, lead PlayStation developer at Sony said.
“And that was fine, that was the world we lived in,” he added. “But at the time of the launch of the PlayStation 3, the world was in flux.
“Since the launch of PlayStation 3, we’ve seen a proliferation of the number and types of devices.”
Suggesting that Sony has addressed these cross platform, with the PS4 offering access to gaming, social and entertainment content from all manner of avenues, such as via the PS Vita, Cerny added that on the company’s next-gen gamers users can “keep in touch with the evolving world of your game, regardless of your location.”
Offering further insight into the capabilities of the next-gen gamer, a console that will land later this year following confirmation of a 2013 holiday season PS4 release date, David Perry, founder of Gaikai, a streaming and social company recently acquired by Sony revealed the true degree of the future PlayStation’s social and remote play integration.
“The base hardware architecture for PlayStation network was designed to integrate social networks through all aspects,” Perry said.
He added: “We believe so much in remote play that it’s been built into the architecture of PlayStation 4… The answer is PlayStation Vita.”
On the console’s cloud gaming capabilities, Perry teased: “We’ll be rolling out PlayStation’s Cloud Services in phases, so we can’t reveal all the possibilities today.”
Do you gaming needs now span a number of devices and mediums or are you happy with the traditional console locked setup? Let us know via the TrustedReviews Twitter and Facebook feeds or through the comment boxes below.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
