CMOT70: You're right about the streaming. But i think they have other motives. The gaming industry is just dying to move to cloud gaming where they absolute have 100% control over their product. The PS4 streaming service is a means of starting to get people using streamed gaming, in a small way that appears of benefit to them. Once people get used to the idea, mostly younger instant gratification generation people, they will say "see it's not so bad" and then they start bringing out small indie games like that. Then AAA games once people have become acceptable to the idea. That is the real purpose of PS4 game streaming, it's Sony laying the ground work for the future. To say i'm anti cloud gaming is an understatement- your game is only playable as long as they decide to keep servers up.
This appears to be a conflict of interests for Sony. On one hand, they have to make the smartest business decisions to make money and keep investors happy. So game downloads in the case of PSone Classics would make more sense vs. streaming. On the other hand, Sony has been upfront about their intention to introduce games as a service.The whole reason of pushing PSNow is to make their games accessible on a multitude of devices, including non-Sony ones.
However, the implications greatly frighten me. By encouraging streaming, they want to take away control from the players and give it all to those who host the streaming servers. If your Internet connection goes down, you're SOL. More significantly, though, is if Sony decides to pull the plug on the operation for any reason. Then - as you said -you can't ever play any of those games again because the servers are no more. To think that the single flick of a switch can control whether or not you can have access to a ton of video games...
If streaming is the only way console games are offered in the future, we are in for a dark period of gaming history. So many games will stand to be lost to time.
