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" During last night&amp;#039;s 2-hour PlayStation 4 sort-of reveal, Sony showed us the future of gaming. And then, just as quickly, it backed away. I&amp;#039;m not referring to the new console&amp;#039;s hardware specifications\u2014the eight-core CPU, the 1.84 TFLOPS GPU, the 8 GB of RAM\u2014which are an incremental improvement over the PlayStation 3&amp;#039;s but still nowhere near the stats of top-tier PC gaming rigs. Nor do I mean the controller&amp;#039;s tiny touchpad, or the included Kinect-like motion-sensing camera, with which developers might do great things. The real potential for a breakthrough was in the software. Baked into the PS4, and the PlayStation Network that connects its players, is the ability to stream video games. It&amp;#039;s called cloud gaming, and it offers a completely new way to play and pay for games. It signals a shift as seismic as the onset of streaming movies and TV shows has been for the entertainment industry. But Sony blinked. Instead of unveiling cloud gaming in all its bewildering glory, allowing PS4 owners to stream new games instead of buying them outright and running those titles at the kinds of graphics settings that would normally send the console&amp;#039;s hardware into seizures, Sony offered up a bunch of nifty but not revolutionary tricks. You can demo a new game before purchasing it. You can stream a friend&amp;#039;s game and take over the controls at his or her request. And you can stream older games, designed for the console&amp;#039;s three previous generations. Yet it&amp;#039;s hard to see this decision as anything but corporate cowardice. Here&amp;#039;s roughly how cloud gaming works, and why it promises to be so destabilizing. Before Sony acquired it last summer, the cloud-gaming service Gaikai allowed you to stream PC games through your browser. For me, the experience was a revelation. I played through the first mission of the first-person shooter Battlefield 3 on my three-year-old Macbook, and it ran beautifully. The graphics were crisp, and there was no lag between making commands and seeing them executed on screen, despite the fact that every mouse click had to be beamed off to a data center, registered by the machine actually running the game, and the results streamed back to my display. Think about that for a moment. Not only was I playing a title that should have forced smoke to pour out of my aging laptop, but I was playing a PC game on a Mac. Cloud gaming effectively ignores your hardware, just as Netflix couldn&amp;#039;t care less whether you&amp;#039;re watching a movie on a phone or a tablet or a smart TV. So long as your device can play video and has a decently fast Internet connection, you can stream digital media\u2014whether it&amp;#039;s a movie you watch or a game you play. What&amp;#039;s frustrating about Sony&amp;#039;s unwillingness to offer full-fledged cloud gaming is that the technical capability already exists. In fact, Sony demonstrated it at last night&amp;#039;s presentation. If you can stream a new PS4 game as a demo, or stream a friend&amp;#039;s game or an older PS3 title, essentially you can stream any game. We even saw the PS Vita handheld device streaming a PS4 title. This is proven technology, shown off by Gaikai before its online demos were pulled (they were playable on the company&amp;#039;s site, as well as on select Facebook pages, up until a few months after Sony bought the company). Even the struggling OnLive service is currently streaming full games to laptops, Android tablets, and LG&amp;#039;s G2 series of smart TVs. OnLive may be prone to signal degradation and frustrating dropouts, but the proof of concept is there. It&amp;#039;s hard to believe that Sony, having absorbed Gaikai&amp;#039;s cloud-gaming know-how and servers, and with its own huge PlayStation Network already deployed, couldn&amp;#039;t roll out streaming games in a way that would send Microsoft scrambling (its updated Xbox is expected this year) and possibly even pull hardcore PC gamers into the fold. Done right, cloud gaming makes PC component upgrades largely irrelevant. It also makes owning games as quaint as owning enormous collections of movies or music. The only reasonable explanation is that Sony couldn&amp;#039;t figure out how to make money with a radically new business model. Considering OnLive&amp;#039;s financial hardships\u2014the company transferred ownership in 2012, selling for just $4.8 million, and has yet to show signs of a rebound\u2014a careful tread is understandable. But for those of us who want to see a genuine revolution in gaming and an end to the draining, decades-long hardware arms race, the PS4 reveal was a crisis of confidence and the worst kind of tease. Sony showed us the promised land. Then it promptly shut the gates. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a8667/the-biggest-letdown-about-the-ps4-cloud-gaming-15127125/?click=pm_news>