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Sony says PS4 cloud features are 'aspirational,' isn't sure what will work on day one

Sony says PS4 cloud features are 'aspirational,' isn't sure what will work on day one

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PS4 Holiday 2013
PS4 Holiday 2013

At Sony's big PlayStation 4 announcement earlier this week, the company made it clear that it was going to rely on the cloud for many of the console's new features. Sony talked up the ability to play online games while they download, uploading and sharing gameplay video on the fly, and a lot of other cloud-based features that appear inspired by the recent purchase of Gaikai. Unfortunately, it's not yet clear what exactly will work out of the box. Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, sat down for an interview with Forbes and was asked if Sony's new fleet of cloud services would be available at launch. "I think it's aspirational on the device, as opposed to us standing up there, pounding the floor and saying the day this thing ships all this stuff will be there," Tretton replied. "I think it'll absolutely be there for the device, but I don't know whether it will be there for day one on the device."

This comment is just the latest piece of evidence that Sony doesn't quite have its ducks in a row regarding the PS4. We already knew that streaming classic PS titles won't be available at launch and that the PS4 won't play any of the native PS3 content users may have accumulated over the years, but now it seems many of the more innovative features PS4 might not be ready to go either. There's a lot of time between now and "holiday 2013" for Sony to nail down all of the PS4's details (including its final hardware design), and we expect we'll hear a lot more details this summer, but it's a little hard to get too excited given all the uncertainty around Sony's next console.