It's a shift from the old idea that you buy games on a DVD, put them in a little black box on your lounge room shelf and play alone, or, if you're lucky, with your family members.
It is the new spirit of gaming espoused by Sony Computer Entertainment, the company that gave the world the PlayStation console in 1994, at a media event to debut the PlayStation 4 held in New York last month.
Many at the launch were miffed that a PS4 console was nowhere to be seen, with Sony only displaying the new box's DualShock 4 controller and 3D-tracking camera.
In theory, much of this new gaming network could be achieved harnessing the existing PlayStation 3 and the cloud.
The significance of PS4 is about Sony adopting standard computer X86 architecture, rather than its own home-brewed processors.
The downside is that gamers' vast collections of DVD games used on the PS3 will not run on the different PS4 architecture.
Instead Sony intends to stream these games from afar to PS4 consoles.
That raises several questions.
Will gamers who paid considerable sums for their now useless collections be compensated in any way?
Will games be streamed to Australia from the US and, if so, how can Sony ensure online gaming experiences aren't ruined by latency problems due to poor internet speeds?
And will Sony invest in Australian-based infrastructure and cloud to ensure the gaming experience down under is first-rate?
We are talking about gaming after all, and while a fraction of a second may mean nothing when waiting for a server to return a client's information from the cloud in business, in gaming, timing is everything.
Nevertheless, the new gaming concept outlined is a step up from the existing PlayStation network, which is primarily a gaming, TV and movie store with streaming game demos.
The new era is about harnessing the internet so that users can play as a team scattered around the world, with a capacity to get help from your friends' networks in difficult gaming situations, and to stream game play to spectators.
Instead of passively perusing Sony's online gaming catalogue, the PS4 software will work out what content a user likes based on their gaming history, and automatically download new content without being asked, so it's available when you realise you want it.
Again, fast internet will be vital to its success, and while Sony will ensure it works in the US and Asia, is the Australian market large enough to ensure attention to this issue here?
The PS4 does offer ripping specs: an 8-core AMD Jaguar X86 64-bit processor and a graphics processing unit with 1.84 Teraflops (one trillion floating point operations per second) for graphics and simulation.
There's 8 Gigabytes of GDDR (Graphics Double Data Rate, version 5) memory, giving the system 176 GB/second of bandwidth.
The PS4 can operate as a game server. Players can pull games from the PS4 and play them on their PS Vita.
While gaming on the PS4, they can view auxiliary information such as maps on an iOS or Android smartphones and tablets using an app.
The PS4 also comes with Sony's new "DualShock 4" controller, which has a clickable touchpad, a share button for uploading recent game play, and a light bar which helps another peripheral, a dual camera , track individual players' positions. Like Microsoft's Kinect, Sony's camera will bring 3D sculpturing to the PS4.
It will be the task of game writers to make use of this enhanced functionality.
The PS4 is due for release at the end of this year and will face competition from Microsoft's Xbox 720, which may hit the market around the same time, but nothing is certain. We may know more when Microsoft holds a similar console debut event possibly next month.
The future for another force in gaming, Nintendo, the maker of Wii consoles, is less certain, with some suggesting the Japanese company could exit from the gaming hardware business altogether and concentrate on software.
Whether Sony succeeds with the PS4 strategy remains to be seen.
The connected world of 2013 is vastly different to when PS3 hit in 2006. That was a year before the launch of the iPhone. There were no modern-era tables, no mobile computing devices that threatened console gaming, and no prospect of the internet streaming high-definition gaming. The console reigned supreme.
Sony also has to overcome a history of huge losses associated with gaming. The Wall Street Journal recently detailed them. They include a $US2 billion operating loss by Sony's gaming division in the year ended March 2007, a $US1.2bn operating loss the following year and a $US600 million operating loss in the year to March 2009. After that, gaming was rolled into a bigger unit with most of Sony's other consumer products.
Sony, however, has a new chief executive, the charismatic Kazuo Hirai, who at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, openly admitted that Sony had lost its way as a cutting-edge technology company but was now aggressively out to restore the "wow" factor to Sony gadgetry.
Hirai's vision is certainly taking shape with the company announcing impressive new smartphone and tablet Xperia Z offerings. In Australia it was the first to show off a new age 4K TV with 8 million pixel resolution.
How Hirai regards gaming in the grand scheme of Sony's future remains to be seen, but if Sony is to succeed in the new era of connected gaming, it will cost money. It will need to invest in infrastructure to guarantee a great online gaming experience.
