With the PlayStation 4, Sony is trying to lower the friction in buying games from PSN by letting you start playing games while they're still downloading. Now it looks like the new feature will actually make it to the PlayStation 3 in time for the PSN release of Naughty Dog’s anticipated The Last of Us on June 14th. Speaking with Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann and game director Bruce Straley, Game Informer reports that the game will be playable once 50 percent of the content has been downloaded, cutting wait time in half.

Onstage at its big PlayStation 4 announcement in February, PS4 lead system architect Mark Cerny said that players would only have to download "just a fraction" of a game’s content before starting to play, so it’s clearly in a different league from what we'll see with The Last of Us. In the longer term, Sony hopes to bring that wait time to zero, pre-emptively downloading games that it thinks you’ll want to buy, but for now, a 50-percent cut is nothing to sneeze at.