PlayStation 4 to stream games in real time over Net

Sony's acquisition last year of cloud-gaming company Gaikai may be reflected in a big way in the upcoming PlayStation 4.

The Wall Street Journal is citing inside sources in reporting that Sony's new gaming console,expected to debut Wednesday at an event in Manhattan, will let people play games streamed in real time over the Internet.

Streaming could also help Sony go at least some way toward addressing the popularity of simple games on smartphones and other devices. As CNET's Rich Brown mentioned when Sony bought Gaikai, the acquired firm seemed to offer potential in terms of enabling higher-end mobile gaming: "Imagine playing a core PlayStation...[game] on your console, then picking the game up exactly where you left off on your cell phone or tablet," he wrote.The report says the streams will involve games designed for the outgoing console, thePlayStation 3. That could be an effort to deal with backward compatibility: last month the Journal reported that for the PS4, Sony would "likely" go with chips from AMD, rather than the Sony-IBM-Toshiba-developed Cell chip that's in the PS3 -- a move that could cause compatibility issues with current games. The new report from the WSJ says the PS4 will be able to accommodate new games stored on optical discs. It's not clear if new games would be streamed as well.

Sony announced the Gaikai deal in July of last year. The cloud service allows for the streaming of beefier games than those commonly played on iPhones and the like (Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, and so on). Company co-founder David Perry told Blogger Gamer back in 2010 that the service was a bit like game arcades back in the day: "You wanted to play the latest machines, but they were $5,000 to $10,000. So you stuck your quarters in." Gaikai created data centers designed to run any modern-day game, at any settings, and then focused on piping streams to the end user.

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