PlayStation Now or never for South Africa?

During CES 2014, Sony unveiled details of its streaming game service called PlayStation Now, which allows users to stream games from the PlayStation 3 library using Gaikai’s cloud technology.

Games can be streamed to PS4 and PS3 systems, with PlayStation Vita and BRAVIA TV support coming later in 2014. Sony said the service will eventually be expanded to multiple Internet connected devices.

We asked Ster Kinekor Entertainment (distributor of Sony products in SA) about the possibility of the service being deployed on our shores, but they only know as much as we do pertaining to the announcement.

During a Q&A providing more details on the service, SCEA PlayStation Digital Platforms manager Matthew Harper explained the bandwidth requirements of the service.

We recommend a 5Mbps+ connection. In our internal tests, users with this bandwidth or greater have been enjoying a low latency, high-quality gaming experience. PS Now tests your connection of each game and optimizes for quality if you are above the minimum requirements.

We strive to make the gameplay experience feel as if the game is being played locally on their device – fast and responsive (including for FPS and games with twitch mechanics).

The Closed Beta will definitely provide a great opportunity to test the experience with gamers with varying connection speeds and our developers will, of course, be working diligently to optimize the service based upon the feedback we receive from the community.

This is a similar requirement as for other streaming game services, such as OnLive, who also recommend a 5Mbps connection to achieve 720p gameplay.

Turning to Ookla’s NetIndex for the latest measurements of South Africa’s Internet quality, we can compare this to the same measurement for the United States (the first territory to see rollout of PlayStation Now).

Net Index Averages (10 December 2013 – 8 January 2014)
	South Africa	United States
Download	4.19Mbps	20.42Mbps
Upload	1.73Mbps	6.21Mbps
Quality Index	83.28	85.53
Cost per Mbps	US$30.20	US$3.74
Global ranking	134	30

Let’s not forget about the cost of broadband in our country as well. Running a 5Mbps connection at full tilt will equate to 2.25GB downloaded per hour.

Streaming gaming services require more than a solid Internet connection. The gaming service provider must have setup regional nodes to process the gameplay data and serve this to the end-user with minimal latency.

Such deployments are not cheap, and Sony must consider the relatively marginal size of the South African gaming market.

Until Sony gives us official word on PlayStation Now in South Africa, my prediction is that it is unfortunately not feasible for deployment here unless the Internet landscape changes for the best – rapidly and dramatically.