When asked about a Spotify-like model for subscription gaming, Shuhei Yoshida (president of Sony’s Wordwide Studio) told the Guardian’s Keith Stuart:
As more and more services and contents become available digitally, we’ll have more of an option to create attractive packages. So hypothetically we can look at different models – like a cable TV company. We could have gold, silver or platinum levels of membership, something like that. We can do subscription services when we have more content – especially now that we have the Gaikai technology available. With one subscription you have access to thousands of games – that’s our dream.
Also mentioned in the interview, all games will be made available for download with “some” being available on disc as well.
PS4 will be similar to PS Vita in that every game will be available as a digital download, and some will also be available as a disc
It remains to be seen exactly what form this will take, and it’s particularly interesting that not all games will be made available on physical discs (I wonder how the games retailers have reacted to this?). Will it be streaming the games or are Sony really expecting people to be downloading 50GB releases every couple of weeks? I’m fortunate to have a reasonably fast, truly unlimited connection but I’m in the minority. And even for me, a 50GB download would take somewhere in the region of 3 hours. That’s not the sort of immediacy people associate with downloaded content. Sony have spoken a little about allowing people to begin playing whilst the download is in progress, but it remains to be seen, as with most things around the PS4, exactly how that will work.