The new tiers of PlayStation Plus premiered nothing, on June 23; In other regions it was even before, but the fact is that we have been reading about this new service for a while and how it manages the oldest part of its catalog. Now, and judging by a recent job offer, it seems that Sony is looking for ways to expand the coverage of the emulation of the Pre-PS4 Games of the premium of the subscription, the most expensive of the three available.
A small summary of the situation. The new PlayStation Plus, which absorbs the game service in the PlayStation Now cloud and transforms the service into something closer to Game Pass (with, from the second of the three tiers available, a collection of several hundred own titles and third parties), includes in its offer a few classic games, of several generations of PlayStation, from the first PSX to the current PS5. There are PS2 games and even PSP; Also of PS3, although those of this have an asterisk: instead of downloading them and playing them via emulator, as happens with those of PSX, PS2 or PSP, those of PS3 are played in the cloud, as already happened in PlayStation Now.
Although it works relatively well, it is still reasonable to say that a non-negligible amount of players prefers that the games run on their own console to avoid some of the most skinny points of streaming, from the problems of input to the visual artifacts. I share with Kotaku the hope that a recent job offer from Sony is giving clues about a possible PlayStation 3 emulator that can natively execute that part of the PS Plus catalog.
In the offer, available on LinkedIn, you can read the following:
Our software development engineer position will work on the PlayStation Studios tool and technology team to support the recently classic relaunches for PS4 and PS5. Classic games work via emulation of old PlayStation platforms. As a classic engineer, you would work hand in hand with a group of other engineers, producers and QA equipment to fix bugs, add new features and Develop new emulators .
The new emulators could mean more than one thing, of course, but right now the only games that do not have their own emulator are those of PlayStation 3; The rest are discharged in the console and emulator is executed by.
The job offer also makes sense if we think that Sony already has some pending tasks related to the emulation of these classic games. Given the criticisms they have been receiving for a while, from the first contact shots with the new PlayStation Plus in different regions of the world, the company already announced that it would add the possibility of playing the NTSC versions of The majority of PSX games ; A few present themselves in PAL version, with the consequent technical limitations. There is also an example of the type of improvements or functionalities related to a job such as the one advertised in the offer: some PSX games try to polish the famerate adding some effects that at the moment seem in the test phase. The most famous is perhaps a controversial frame blending that adds a remarkable ghosting to some of the games in which it is applied (which are not all, a majority, in fact).
On the new plus we talk long and lying, analyzing their strengths and its weaknesses, in the fold this week, the last of the season. You can listen to it below (or on the platform where you prefer to listen to podcasts) from minute 39.