So your online looking at video game articles and you stumble across something that mentions online storage or online streaming. You wonder what this means and what it’s good for. Well I am here to help you out.

The Next Generation for PSN?

First off let’s talk about what online storage or online storage is. Online storage is where your games, saves, and media is stored off-sire, online. The way Onlive works where you play, rent, save, and do everything with your games over the internet. It doesn’t all have to be internet based though your games could be stored locally while your saves are off-site.

Local storage where all your data is stored locally. Your game data, saves, everything is on your hard drive. Now let’s use these examples with a Playstation 3. Right now Playstation games are more or less all local. You play then after they are downloaded to your local ps3 HDD and play and save right there. What would Playstation be like with online or online storage?

Say you want to play infamous. You would turn on your ps3, connect to PSN, start streaming infamous and your save if you have one. Play the game over the internet. This system would work really well for game rentals but there are so many problems with this despite it’s advantages.

Is Onlive making the right move?

If your ps3 would happen to get disconnected from the internet or the internet would go out then you are SOL or screwed you can’t play your games or continue at your saves. The technology for internet connection hasn’t advanced enough to support this type of system yet either in my opinion. To not only stream HD graphics, real-time 3D action, and great sound quality to your ps3 on a standard internet connection but to also have no lag on controller inputs would be a challenge for anyone who doesn’t have a T1 line or fiber-optics. If Fiber could become the standard internet for most household however I could see this being changed but not only would that take years but it would also cost lot’s of money.

On the flip-side if your games would become lost or damaged locally or your hard drive in your PS3 would die you could still have all your games and saves safe on the internet. This at times is very useful. Peace of mind isn’t the only good thing about that though. If your someone like me who never has their games organized well enough this would also be good for you to keep them organized.

I am not saying Sony should do something like Onlive or that they will ever do something similar to this but for any system you can think of do you think Online storage and streaming is the right choice or should games stay local? Please discuss this in the comments.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 5:10 pm and is filed under General, Playstation 3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.