PS4 Digital Library Will Allow Immediate Gameplay On Any Console

In an article from the Official PlayStation Magazine, Sony’s Research and Development senior team leader Neil Brown noted that with the new features of the PS4 your digital library will become much easier to use and play on multiple consoles.

"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.A similar system also works on Blu-ray, chunks are automatically copied to the hard drive in the background. This means that after the first few minutes your game can rely on having faster read speeds from the hard drive. Which provides a better experience for players, and this is a completely background process for the player. They don’t have to wait for anything to install before playing the game. The game will launch as soon as the disk has been put in the drive."

While it seems to have the same effect as the PS3 and the Xbox 360 in allowing you to download and play games on separate consoles, on the PS4 you will be able to play these games right away after a small initial install. The 8GB GDDR5 RAM will allow an easier background install of the rest of the digital content and will get you playing the games quicker than ever. It should be a big benefit for lesser-known PSN and indie games that would be otherwise difficult to spread the news about to your friends.

It does, however, mean that more people would likely be downloading games straight to their hard drive, which ships with 500GB of space. While the PS4 HDD is removable and replaceable, with this new Play As You Download feature paired with accessibility of the game sharing you might need to upgrade sooner rather than later.

Source: Official PlayStation Magazine via NeoGAF