Sony PlayStation 4 Scoop - ALL Games to Be Available as Downloads!

Related: Sony, Playstation 4, Gaming

Sony last week introduced PlayStation4 (PS4), its next generation computer entertainment system, showing the media and hungry gamers everything but the console itself.

Today, Sony's Shuhei Yoshida told the Guardian UK that ALL games would be available for download.

It was interesting to see the indie game designer Jonathan Blow on stage at your event. How important is it to you to support smaller studios?
I believe it's very important for the platform to have a wide variety of developers making things that are unique and creative. We're shifting our platform more and more to the digital side - PS4 will be similar to PS Vita in that every game will be available as a digital download, and some will also be available as a disc. The Witness will be a digital release and because of the flexibility of the digital distribution scheme, we can have more small games that might be free or available for a couple of dollars, or different services like free-to-play or subscription models.

On that subject, I really expected you to announce a "Spotify for games"-type service, allowing gamers to sign up and pay a monthly fee to access as many titles as they like. Is that something we can look forward to?
As more and more services and contents become available digitally, we'll have more of an option to create attractive packages. So hypothetically we can look at different models - like a cable TV company. We could have gold, silver or platinum levels of membership, something like that. We can do subscription services when we have more content - especially now that we have the Gaikai technology available. With one subscription you have access to thousands of games - that's our dream.

PS4 was designed from the ground up to ensure that the very best games and the most immersive experiences reach PlayStation gamers. PS4 accomplishes this by enabling the greatest game developers in the world to unlock their creativity and push the boundaries of play through a system that is tuned specifically to their needs.

PS4 also fluidly connects players to the larger world of experiences offered by PlayStation, across the console and mobile spaces, and PlayStation Network (PSN).

The PS4 system architecture is distinguished by its high performance and ease of development. PS4 is centered around a powerful custom chip that contains eight x86-64 cores and a state of the art graphics processor.

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has been enhanced in a number of ways, principally to allow for easier use of the GPU for general purpose computing (GPGPU) such as physics simulation. The GPU contains a unified array of 18 compute units, which collectively generate 1.84 Teraflops of processing power that can freely be applied to graphics, simulation tasks, or some mixture of the two.

PS4 is equipped with 8 GB of unified system memory, easing game creation and increasing the richness of content achievable on the platform. GDDR5 is used for this memory, giving the system 176 GB/second of bandwidth and providing a further boost to graphics performance.
The end result for gamers is new games with rich, high-fidelity graphics and deeply immersive experiences that shatter expectations.

Shared Game Experiences
Social interaction is central to PS4 experiences, so new features were built into the actual foundation of the system's hardware architecture. PS4 provides dedicated, "always on" video compression and decompression systems that enables Seamless uploading of gameplay. For the first time ever, gamers can share their epic triumphs with the press of a button. Gamers simply hit the "SHARE button" on the controller, scan through the last few minutes of gameplay, tag it and return to the game-the video uploads as the gamer plays. Gamers can share their images and videos to their friends on social networking services such as Facebook.
PS4 also enhances social spectating by enabling gamers to broadcast their gameplay in real-time to friends using live internet streaming services such as Ustream. During live broadcasts, friends can make comments on the streamed gameplay and, if a gamer gets stuck on a challenging level, friends can also join the game in completely new ways. For example, friends can offer health potions or special weapons when a player needs them most during actual gameplay.

Furthermore, users can connect their Facebook account with Sony Entertainment Network account. Through PS4, users are able to deepen their connections through co-op play or "cross-game chat".

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