PS4 Will Not Need An Always Online Connection
Last night in the PS4 announcement I’ll admit that I was a bit nervous about what Sony didn’t say about the PS4. For instance, they didn’t mention the Blu-Ray drive, though it was revealed a little later on in the full spec sheet that it would come with such a drive. The other big thing I was nervous about was Sony’s insistence on always being connected in order to share your gaming experiences through streaming and Facebook.
The fact is, there’s still a good portion of the US, and indeed, the world, that does not have high speed internet. Luckily for those Sony fans who don’t have a good, constant high speed connection Sony will not require an always-on connection in order to use the PS4. The news was unveiled by Eurogamer after an interview with Sony’s head of worldwide game studios, Shuhei Yoshida.
That being said, Sony will be encouraging people to keep their systems online, in order to keep patching and updating games, and so that they can build up their profile on you so that they can load a game up on your hard drive before you even decide to buy it. After all, while Sony might not block you from using used games, they surely would prefer that you have a non-physical game that you can’t sell off to GameStop. At the very least, though, it’s good to know that if my internet connection goes out I’ll still be able to play games during the outage.
