At Gamescom this week, Share Play was confirmed as coming to PS4 in Update 2.0 later this year, and the new feature will allow players to give friends access to their console and then play games remotely. We reported on it yesterday, but since then plenty more details have emerged and/or been clarified.
For a start, and perhaps most notably, Sony's Jim Ryan told GameSpot that Share Play sessions will be restricted to 60-minute bursts, so you won't be able to take over a friends console (with their permission of course) and play through a whole game uninterrupted. There's no limit on the amount of sessions a player can offer to a friend, but it's still unclear if there's a cooldown restriction of some sort that would stop multiple sessions being played in a row.
Ryan also confirmed (to GameBlog) that while you will be able to use someone's PS Plus account to play online, you won't be able to play against the owner of the game in competitive multiplayer unless you're also PS Plus member yourself. Presumably then local co-op and split-screen is fine, and when they say competitive multiplayer they're talking about games like Call of Duty, where multiple players can use the same screen and play online together. To do that, you'll need your own online privileges.
Sony Worldwide Studios CEO Shuhei Yoshida also confirmed how a typical Share Play session would begin: "How it works is, for example, say, 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. You could call it a mini PlayStation Now."
Sony also confirmed to Kotaku that: "In Share Play, the visitor (the one who doesn't own the game) takes over the host (the one who owns the game)'s account, so the visitor cannot save their play data onto their own account," which is basically the opposite of what was said yesterday.
Still, all in all, it sounds like a great new feature, and we can't wait to see how it works later this year when Update 2.0 lands.