Sony’s Playstation Now beta is rolling out across North America, and a tester has decided to do some recording of the experience and show off how it plays and how long games take to load.
During the video you’ll clearly be able to see that it does become laggy at points and the user points out that its a little too much to be completely enjoyable. Despite the fact he has a faster connection than most users would have access to, 100mb he still suffers from long loading and significant lag.
It’s important to remember before judging this too harshly that it is only a beta and not the final product, therefore Sony are likely to improve the experience. Better compression of data shall likely play a crucial role in improving the quality of gameplay. There’s of course other issues such as optimizing their own servers and technology.
Playstation Now relies on the acquired Gaikai technology, and is running on the RackSpace open cloud so there’s plenty of scope for performance and scalability. With all of that said cloud gaming isn’t at the point where the experience will match sitting next to a local console. The small exceptions would be similar to the streaming from Steam, but that’s in your own home on a local Wi-Fi connection which is obviously far far different.
