G33K LYFE: Sony makes a game-changing announcement at CES

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: SONY
Could Crash Bandicoot be returning to consoles with PlayStation Now?

The annual Consumer Electronics Show provides a location for the world's tech heads to descend upon to see the debut of the next waves in computers, televisions and more. Due to the nature of the industry, however, the products shows at the CES are unlikely to wind up in the homes of the average consumer anytime soon, but it's always worth keeping an eye on where the future is going.

However, at this year's expo, Sony made what could prove to be one of the most significant announcements the CES has ever seen. Sony officially announced PlayStation Now, the evolution of the Gaikai streaming service that the company acquired a couple of years ago. The service has the potential to bring long-lasting change to the entire gaming industry when the system is launched in full at the end of the summer.

Riding the success of the PlayStation 4's November release, Sony's public image in the gaming world is at an all-time high. It managed to send another shockwave through the industry when it addressed the PS4's one major complaint: the lack of backwards compatibility. Boasting a historical lineup of games and characters that is second only to Nintendo, there was a marked disappointment by fans that the new console would not be able to play the classic games that many of them had grown up with. The early success of the PS4 has also seen a large number of “converts,” or people who chose other consoles for their past gaming experiences, yet were swayed by the PlayStation 4 one way or another, giving Sony a demographic that has never experienced Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted or The Last of Us — games that stand high in the pantheon of great historical games, and games that were missed by anybody who had never owned a Sony console before.

While it is no surprise that this new service will be available on the entire Sony lineup of video game consoles, the most shocking aspect of this announcement is that PlayStation Now will be available on all Bravia televisions from 2014 onward. Now, as long as you have a controller and a 5mb/s Internet connection, any Sony TV models will be able to give you access to the entire library of PlayStation games, opening them up to a whole market of potential gamers where there otherwise wouldn't have been.

Logically, Microsoft will need some sort of response to this new service, their Xbox One is already slightly behind its competitor and a successful launch of the virtual streaming and rental service by Sony could see the console slip even further behind. Microsoft has been relatively quiet on this front, merely claiming to be “considering the best options,” according to the official Xbox Twitter account, but most fans are expecting some sort of announcement by this summer's E3.