PlayStation has announced cloud-game streaming for PlayStation 5 owners, and it’s coming to the UK on October 23.
This feature will be available to PlayStation Plus Premium members. That is the highest tier of the PlayStation Plus subscription, at £13.49 a month or £119 a year.
PlayStation Plus streaming will let you play games from the Plus Game Catalogue, from your own collection, and the service’s Game Trials, over the internet.
The main benefit is you will no longer need to install these games to your PlayStation 5’s own storage. That means less game juggling, less time waiting for the data to download, which is big when some games weigh in at over 100GB.
Here are “just a few” of the titles PlayStation 5 owners will be able to stream from October 23:
- Dead Island 2
- Fall Guys
- Fortnite
- Genshin Impact
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Hogwarts Legacy
- Horizon Forbidden West
- Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
- Mortal Kombat 11
- Resident Evil 4
- Saints Row IV
- The Calisto Protocol
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
“We’re planning to have hundreds of PS5 titles to support this new benefit,” says Nideaki Nishino, senior vice president of platform experience at Sony Interactive Entertainment.
How PlayStation 5 game-streaming works
The important part to note here is PlayStation 5 game streaming doesn’t actually confer access to these games. It’s simply another way to play games PlayStation Plus owners already have access to through the service’s Game Catalogue, its Game Trials, or just by you actually owning them already.
PlayStation 5 game streaming is also quite limited compared to that of Xbox Game Pass because, at launch, you can only stream from the console itself.
With Game Pass Ultimate you can play Xbox games on your phone, if you like. Still, Sony has big plans for game streaming. Its PlayStation Portal streaming handheld is out on November 15.
There are no obvious complaints to be made about the quality aspirations of PlayStation 5 cloud streaming at launch either.
It can broadcast at up to 4K resolution, 60 frames per second, in HDR where available. Surround sound and Tempest 3D Audiotech audio are on the roll call, too.
Sony says you will need an internet connection of at least 38mbps to stream at 4K, 15mbps for 1080p. And there’s a minimum requirement of 5mbps, although streaming on such a connection would likely not be a pleasant experience.
We are getting game streaming a week before the Americans. Sony plans to launch in Japan on October 17, in the UK and Europe on October 23, and in North America on October 30.
This is not the first time PlayStation Plus has used game streaming, of course. Any time you play a PlayStation 3 game from the Game Catalogue, it is streamed over your home internet, as the PlayStation 5 cannot play games from that generation natively.
However, this development sees PlayStation game streaming get closer to parity with the Xbox equivalent.
