In a post on Official Playstation Magazine UK, Sony’s R&D senior team leader Neil Brown announced that users can access their digitally purchased PS4 games on any console. Speaking at the Develop Conference, Brown also revealed that gamers could make use of the ‘play as you download’ feature to start playing games before the full title is downloaded onto the console, reducing the waiting time.
Brown explains:
“You can visit your friends’ house, you can log into your account and play any game from your digital library, which is good. But how useful is that if it takes half a day to download the game you want to play? With Play As You Download you get much quicker access to at least the first section of the game so you can start playing quicker. So this makes a digital library a practical option in the real world.”
The PS4 will download the remaining contents of a game in the background, allowing you to play the first level of the game after an initial download. Brown also said that a similar system also works on Blu-ray titles, where chunks of the game are copied automatically to the hard drive and after the first few minutes, your game benefits from having faster read speeds from the hard drive. This means you will no longer have to install game data before you’re able to play a game – unlike a number of PS3 titles, which required game data to be installed before allowing you to play.