I forget how this all works as I don’t us the PS4 all that much.
I have a profile on my PS 4 and it’s tied to a playstation account online. I want to create a profile for my son. He doesn’t play online multiplayer. Up until now he just uses my profile. Is there a benefit for him to create his own profile? His own set of save games I guess would be one, anything else? If he has his own profile, he’d get to use my PSNow or PS Plus if I got it, right?
Does PS Now work well? I’m looking for some stuff for my son to play and that would be a quick way to get access to some games. Would I be better off with PS Plus?
You need a second profile to do couch multiplayer: Overcooked, Rocket League, Minecraft, etc.
If he’s a subaccount of yours, he’ll have access to anything on your console. Whether he can actually play them depends on your privacy and parental control settings.
There is a caveat, or at least used to be, I don’t know if it has been changed: If your son is approaching teen years, his sub account will ALWAYS be a subaccount, so when he leaves the nest, he won’t be able to take that account with him, get his own PS+, etc…
When my son left for the service several years ago, we found out this harsh reality and he lost all of his hard earned K/D ratios =)
Does he need an online playstation acount for anything? I use mine to buy games, but if he is just playing what I buy can he only have a local profile?
When you talk about a sub account, is that an online playstation account or a local profile?
My son isn’t a big gamer, so he probably would be OK with needing to start over with a new account when he gets old enough to move out (he’s 11.5 years old now).
He does occasionally use his money to buy a game, but by the time he is on his own it’s not like he would be playing what he would buy now.
I think to play anything online with his friends, it would need to be a sub-account. To play couch with you probably local account is fine? I’ve had people drop by during social gatherings and do a quickie local account for couch play without needing something more.
This probably falls under the category of rumor, since we don’t know what will come of it if anything, but it is a possibility I find intriguing:
If this gets implemented in the PS5 and, let’s say best case, allows for full compatability with their previous systems’ libraries, I will buy a PS5 day one. It’s mindblowing to me that Sony is sitting on a goldmine of older games being ignored.
And you know what, I might do the same thing. If I could keep playing my games, I could bring the old console to another room. It still works for other uses like streaming and disc playing.
You’re talking PS4 backward compatibility, yeah I would expect that. I mean full backward compatibility, with games you very likely already own, not having to rebuy them each generation.
Yeah, if the PS5 could play all previous playstation games I owned from each generation, not just PS4? Yeah, Day One here as well. That would be amazing.
Could be. But since backward compatibility has been such a known issue/thing for so long, perhaps Sony or whomever finally got intelligent and just incorporated a license permitting use for future systems into their agreements.
As far as I’ve ever read or heard, it’s purely the tech stuff. The only time IP gets dragged in is if they want to do digital rereleases or do something like Microsoft’s BC setup on Xbox One, which involves downloading digital copies of the games in question because of how everything on XB1 is set up.
Yeah, ironically allowing universal backwards compatibility is legally easier with physical games because you sidestep the distribution problem. Hopefully the contracts around PSN releases for PS4 were smart enough to anticipate PS5 backwards compatibility for digital titles.
I thought they didn’t want to do backward compatibility because they or the creators were terrified you’d buy say a PS5 and then just buy PS4 games at cheaper prices instead of the fresh new games they wanted to sell.