Gaming | June 22, 2023
While a PlayStation Plus subscription currently includes access to PlayStation 5 games, all of these games are available for download. However, Sony is soon planning to enable streaming of several of these titles directly from the cloud. The company has started testing this functionality, which will be implemented in PS Plus in the future.
The official announcement came from Nick Maguire, Vice President of Global Services and Sales at Sony, in a statement on the official PlayStation blog:
“We’re currently testing game streaming in the cloud for PlayStation 5 titles. This includes games from the PlayStation Plus catalog and some game demos, as well as digital games that players own in their libraries. […] When this feature is ready, it will be possible to stream PS5 games directly to your PlayStation 5 console.”
There are three key points in this announcement: firstly, it mentions that once the feature is ready, game streaming will be possible “directly to your PS5 console,” meaning it won’t be available on PC, at least initially. PlayStation Plus Premium allows game streaming on PC, but PS5 games will not be included, only on PlayStation 5 consoles.
The second key point is that the statement refers to “compatible” PS5 games, indicating that not all games on the console will be available for streaming. And the third key point, perhaps the most important one, is that by being able to stream PS5 games, including your own digitally owned games, there will be no need to download and install them, thus saving space on the console’s storage, which is less than 900GB.
It’s still unclear when this feature will be available to PS5 users subscribed to PlayStation Plus Premium. However, the fact that it will be initially rolled out to the “Premium” version of PS Plus could mean that some territories will be excluded, at least during the launch (territories such as countries in Latin America that don’t have PS Plus Premium but rather PS Plus Deluxe). It’s also unknown if the feature will be available on the new handheld PlayStation device/console, the PlayStation Project Q.
