PlayStation Owners Can Access Their Digital Games on Any PS4

Logging into your account on a friend’s PS4 will grant instant access to all your digital games.

Sony’s strategy for selling the PS4 to gamers has, in no small part, been rooted in the idea of choice. Whereas other console makers have tried to control player’s access to things like used games, Sony and the PS4 came out with a do-what-you-want message of player freedom that earned the new console more gamer brownie points than the company could probably ever have hoped for. To its credit, Sony actually seems to be making good on its sales pitch of freedom, something exhibited by some of the features the company has revealed.

Just recently, for instance, Sony outlined how the PlayStation 4’s “play as you download” option would help players better utilize their digital library. One of the selling points to come out of the conversation was the ability of gamers to log on to any PS4 anywhere and immediately find themselves able to play their purchased games. “You can visit your friends house you can log into your account and play any game from your digital library, which is good,” said Neil Brown, a team leader with Sony’s R&D, speaking at Develop. “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.”

While you can probably still expect most PS4 owners to play games in the comfort of their own homes, the “play as you download” feature as it’s been outlined will, in the least, give PS4 owners another reason to push their friends into the PlayStation fold. That being said, we can’t help but wonder if any steps will be taken to mitigate the possible abuse of things like account sharing. After all, if access to your entire digital library is just a log-in screen away, what’s to stop you from just handing a buddy your user name and password and letting them go to town on your games free of charge? We’ll be interested to see how that pans out in the future.

Source: Official PlayStation Magazine