As home game consoles get increasingly more sophisticated they bear a closer resemblance to personal computers than they do the consoles of old. Along with that technological leap comes the ability for consoles to do more, such as play and capture all sorts of media and serve as more of a home entertainment device than simply a game console. The PlayStation 4 is certainly much closer to a powerful gaming PC from a few years ago than any other console has been.
So why not actually, you know, run PC games on it? According to Engadget that is exactly what someone has decided to do by running Linux on a jailbroken PS4. From what we can see of the game Bastion running in the video above it doesn’t exactly work that great, but it does run. By the looks of it, Linux and Steam are running directly off of the PS4, which might not be the best way to do this. It has been worked on for a while now, though.
Steam actually has a device that they released, called the Steam Link that is a tiny box that sits on your television stand and can stream games from your PC (connected to the same network) to your television that sells for $50, so hacking a PS4 to shoddily run PC titles doesn’t seem like the best use for a $350 console unless you are into tinkering. It’ll be interesting to see if someone simply takes the Steam Link software and installs that on the PS4, now that would probably work a whole lot better.
(Via Engadget)