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Consoles Should Stream to PCs

Consoles Should Stream to PCs

Why is no one talking about this?

Your console can stream practically anything at this point. You can watch TV, play old games on a remote server, and Sony has said that the PS4 will even let you play games as you download them! Streaming is the wave of the future, and yet we here in PC land wonder “where’s the streaming love?”

Recently, Steam launched it’s in home streaming service that lets you stream games from one PC to another. This allowed you to play your awesome triple A games on computers with merely a fraction of the processing power, and it worked! You could take your dinky little business laptop and play Borderlands 2 at high spec. It was awesome.

So my question is, why not do the same thing for PCs? I’m not talking about using a PC to stream to a console. There’s no way that Microsoft or Sony would want us supplementing their games with games from Steam. What I mean is, let your console stream to your PCs!

Seriously, think about it. How convenient would it be to access all of your PC and console games at once? You could pair your PC to your console via Bluetooth to turn it on. Then you can just open up a program on your PC that streams the console activity straight to your monitor. A couple clicks and you are off and running in Titanfall or inFAMOUS Second Son or whatever.

Not to mention it would offer you incredible flexibility. Want to manage your messages on PSN? Done, done with a couple taps and you didn’t even need to hook up a USB keyboard. Want to buy a new game? It’s way easier to navigate the store through a computer interface than it is with a controller. Heck, what if you DON’T have a great media or gaming computer? Now you can suddenly PC game by using your console!

Granted this would present some problems. It would probably be too laggy to play a twitch intense game. Fighting games, for example would experience unacceptable levels of lag. Shooters would be bearable but still would play wonky. But single player games would be fine, especially more casual games.

Consoles Should Stream to PCs

But there’s really no downside to this functionality. The device that is streaming is either the PS4 or the Xbox One, so you’d still have to purchase console games. That way Sony and Microsoft aren’t losing any money. I suppose third party developers might get pissed as they would have a harder time selling PC versions of their games, but honestly, who buys BOTH a PC and console version of a game anyway? That seems… wasteful. Not to mention I don’t think third party developers would have enough power to make both Sony and Microsoft choose to not implement a new console feature.

It just seems weird that no console developer is talking about this possibility. We are living in an age where our consoles are “life devices” and “mini-computers” so why not increase their computer connectivity. It’s not hard, heck the Xbox One is practically running Windows 8 already. If you look hard enough you can find hackers editing save files and running virtual OSes for the PS4 and Xbox One already. I’m sure with a little time, hackers could also figure out how to make the PS4 and Xbox One powerful streaming boxes. But, why limit this connectivity just to hackers and pirates? Open it up to the legitimate consumer as well.

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