Playstation 4 Share Play Only Lasts 60 Minutes

If you recall, way back when the PS4 was announced at E3, one of the more unusual features advertised was the ability to let other people play the game for you—it was advertised as a sort of momentary loan or extra help where a friend could grab control of your game on your behalf and you could watch them beat that level you need to go past… or laugh as they fail even worse than you did.

It was an interesting little feature, but the PS4 wasn’t launched with it—and a lot of people, myself included, kind of forgot it was part of the deal.  Thankfully, Sony hadn’t forgotten, and this fall a new update called Version 2—and within Version 2 is the “Share Play” feature we were told about.

And with that announcement came specifics on how it would work...

It’s a fairly simple system, probably more simple than it sounded back at that old E3.  Basically, it acts as a “mini-playstation now”, where a friend can play my game in quick 60-minute sessions as long as you both have a Playstation Plus account. 

Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida explained it like so;

"How it works is, for example, a friend has a game that I don't.  I ask them to let me play it, and if they send me an invitation, I can access their PS4 and play while watching the video that is streamed."

It also works for multiplayer games, so you can play along with your invited buddy. 

Other than that, however, we don’t know much else, such as if there’ s a ‘cool down’ period between sessions or if you can invite the same person to play the same game multiple times.  It would be nice if there weren’t, but that might be giving Sony a bit too much credit.

One more bit of good news, though, is that developers won’t have to work or change their game to be Share Play adaptable.    Which implies it’s pretty much automatically going to work with any game, although there’s no guarantee companies can’t specifically opt out.

I guess we’ll know for sure come this fall.