One of the big benefits of Steam is the ability to pre-load games before they actually release. This is a really neat feature where you can setup a game to download silently in the background. Well, Sony is adopting this same feature and they're taking it one step further with remote pre-loading.
So what's this talk of remote pre-loading? Well, PlayStation LifeStyle pulled quotes from Sony's Worldwide boss Shuhei Yoshida in his interview with the Guardian, where he notes...
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.
This is great news for those of you out there with super-fast connection speeds where you can afford to download games at the brisk pace of a gazelle sprinting across the arid plains of Africa. But the real highlight is the ability to remotely access your account and add games when you're not even near your console thanks to the low-power mode built into the PS4, with Yoshida noting...
“I find myself spending more time playing Vita games and I think part of the reason for that is it’s immediate. I can stop at any time without quitting and it’s instantaneous to start again. I don’t have to quit out or reboot. It’s wonderful. That’s one part of immediacy – the other is waiting for downloads. That’s ridiculous, that’s crazy! We want to get out of this madness with PlayStation 4. The games are big, they’re 50GB; download isn’t instantaneous. So we’re making purchase available from any device, so when you’re at work, you can spend a couple of moments looking at PlayStation Store and choosing a game, and straight away it starts to download at home. It may take a couple of hours but that’s okay because you’re still at work.“Also, similarly to progressive download on some movie services, you don’t have to wait for all the data to download before you start playing. Once you have the minimum amount of data downloaded you can begin the game, and while you play, the remaining data downloads. It takes some engineering input from developers so we’re talking to the community. We’re evangelising it.”
That's pretty wicked. You could pre-load the game from work and then, I'm guessing, Gaikai-it when you get home until the download completely finishes.
Given the piss-poor connection speeds here in America and the data caps implemented by many ISPs, I don't see the download option taking any sort of precedence over the bread and butter that is retail, but it's nice Sony is already thinking ahead of what our current internet and data infrastructure allows.
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