Episode 556 - Vita Means Life, And That's Beautiful

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://shows.acast.com/vicegamingsnewpodcast/episodes/episode-556-vita-means-life-and-thats-beautiful
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vita Vita VITA

Hmmm. I see three possible interpretations of this:

  1. You get to play PS5 anywhere in your local Wi-Fi. Boring. Cheap, but boring. Probably not what they’re doing.
  2. Your PS5 serves as your personal cloud server. Slightly more interesting, but unless you have Twitch streamer internet with gigabit upload, if you’re more than 50 miles away, you’re going to have a bad time playing anything that isn’t like…Sudoku.
  3. Gaikai. Sony serves you games from their cloud service when you’re not in Wi-Fi range of your console. It would be a pretty impressive feat of technology to pull this off, since you’d have to have cloud management smart enough to spin up instances of a game with whatever appropriate DLC enabled (to say nothing of trying to play a mod-enabled Skyrim remotely). It’s possible, but 1. this is essentially Google Stadia and we saw how well that turned out and 2. are people really going to be down for paying another $20 “cloud fee” to play these games on the road? Is this going to be another tier of PlayStation Plus?

I guess my take here is “they could, but I have lots of questions”

P.S. Give me Metal Gear Acid 3, cowards

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Your interpretations interests me a lot and I do think that there will certainly be people who want this peripheral but I still can’t help but wonder how many of the current installer base. Like you mentioned, Stadia was a pretty impressive flop (maybe in part because noone was going to pony up on the massive infrastructure undertaking needed to make that technology more viable for people who’d find it a more attractive option and that what that looks like differs from country to country).

I think to me it would make the most sense to just have… a handheld that can run things natively, but I know that’s my wishful (selfish) thinking as someone who prefers handhelds. It’s not tech for people like me who are interested in their library but don’t have the latest console from them, so I am curious about how successful their push to convince people to purchase this will be.