You May Already Own a PlayStation 4: The Sci-Fi Implications of Last Night’s Big Sony-Gaikai News

We can always count on the people at PlayStation for planting crazy ideas about the future of gaming in our heads. These are the people who advertised the PlayStation 2 with a commercial for the PlayStation 9, who told us that their PS2 games would look like Pixar movies and who, at one time, were trying to convince us that the then-upcoming PS3 would be more powerful if it was on the same home network as a refrigerator that had its own PS3-style computer chip. Or was it a toaster? It doesn't matter. It didn't happen.
With Sony's continued refusal to say anything about the PS4 (psst. Codename Orbis!), the world of PlayStation has become all too much in the present. This is not what we demand from Sony. We demand sci-fi from Sony. Last night, we got that.
 
It's time to think about the future of PlayStation in crazy ways again, now that they spent about a third of a billion dollars on an outfit called Gaikai.
Gaikai is a cloud gaming service, which is not as boring as it sounds. It's a technology, similar to OnLive, that zaps video game graphics and sound into your home from servers faraway while you zap inputs from your game controller back up to those same servers. This tech is what enables Gaikai to let you play Alan Wake on a web browser or Mass Effect 3 on Facebook. All of the processing that a console would do is happening far, far away, well outside your living room or home. When Gaikai works, you're essentially able to play video games with an extremely long controller cord that might be stretching halfway across your state or country.
Here's the Xbox 360, PS3 game Bulletstorm running in the Google Chrome web browser, for example.
Sony is now in the process of buying Gaikai. Specifically, Sony Computer Entertainment (aka PlayStation) is buying them. That's got people dreaming that the idea of the game console as some sort of physical box that you bring into your home could be going extinct. Who would need to buy a PlayStation 4, the thinking goes, if you could use Gaikai to stream PS4—level-no, let's just say actual PlayStation 4—graphics and sound into your living room through your computer while you send commands from a DualShock controller back upstream?
Gaikai and Sony could make your need to buy a new game console irrelevant, right? Why, you could just stream in PS4 games through your… PS3! And do the same for PS5, PS6 and PS7. End of hardware cycles. End of console generations.
Well, no.

That's the kind of sci-fi future you might foresee if you were the kind of person who really expected the PlayStation 3 to ship with the ability to output to two HDTVs at once (they cut that before shipping).
Gaikai won't make console hardware obsolete, because Gaikai doesn't run everywhere. It requires a stable and fast Internet connection. The company's FAQ asks for "5+ megabits [downstream], but many demos will still work around 3 megabits". That's fine, except it doesn't work in my house in Brooklyn, not if I'm using my Internet connection for other things.

 More information on the site: http://kotaku.com/ps4/