PlayStation 4 will make PS Vita Remote Play mandatory.
In an interesting move by Sony to promote their portable console, PlayStation 4 games will have a mandatory requirement that Remote Play on the PS Vita is possible.
How this will affect PlayStation 4 gamers remains to be seen, but now publishers hoping to put games on Sony’s next generation console will need to keep the PS Vita in mind. It’s not like this concept hasn’t been done before, in fact it’s been done twice in the console gaming industry. PlayStation 3 owners were allowed to play their games via a WiFi connection on their PSP, but the technology hadn’t been fully fleshed out yet, and didn’t work very well. This is the same technology that the Nintendo’s Wii U GamePad uses, so it has been perfected since.
In a surprising reflection of the reported upgrade in technology used by the Xbox One’s Kinect, the PlayStation 4’s Remote Play technology with the PS Vita will be an improved and “fixed” version of what gamers used with the previous generation’s coupling.
What Remote Play actually does is it takes the game from the “big brother” console and streams it using the console’s own built-in WiFi signal to the portable device, making it possible to play the games on the portable device.
How this will work with the PS Vita’s native controls remains to be seen, as the PlayStation 4’s DualShock 4 controller obviously has more buttons. It could be that Sony is planning to integrate Android and iOS-style touchscreen “buttons” to make up for them. How would this work, you might ask? The touchscreen would display buttons on the screen itself that act as the buttons that aren’t physically there. The biggest problem with this is that you can’t feel the extra buttons that way, causing a lot of “look over” issues which can interfere with action titles.
This is obviously Sony attempting to promote sales for its portable device which is reportedly not selling as well as they’d hoped.
What do you think of Sony making PS Vita Remote Play mandatory for PlayStation 4 games?
