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Sony Cloud Service Speculations: Playstation Everywhere and PC Gaming on a Console

By | on July 3, 2012 | 8 Comments
PC Sony
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Recently, Sony opened their bomb-bay doors and dropped a megaton on the industry when they revealed they acquired Gaikai, a leading cloud based gaming company. The news brings some validation to recent rumors that Sony would look to Gaikai to offer PS3 owners with backwards compatibility through an upgraded Playstation Plus plan. I believe having access to a library of PS2 and PS1 titles in the cloud is a great idea because your enjoyment of backwards capability before Sony took it away with the PS3 Slim is limited by the amount of actual physical games you own.

Andrew House of SCE stated that will bring the cloud-streaming service “anywhere on a variety of internet-connected devices“. Will Sony attempt to spread the Playstation brand name to all available devices on the market or stick to Sony devices such as the PS Vita, Xperia, and the recently Playstation certified HTC One?

Another possibility is that Gaikai could bring PC gaming to the PS3 and PS4 because they own the rights to stream a selection of third-party titles, and technically so does Sony. Will Playstation fans be able to enjoy Witcher 2 and Alan Wake in the future or will the cloud service only stream Playstation titles such as Everquest and Planetside 2?

Could Playstation 3 owners be streaming Planetside 2 soon? Quite possibly…

I believe it is possible that Sony envisions a future where gamers can enjoy the Playstation’s history of content anywhere they want at anytime on all available mobile devices. PC gaming on a Playstation console is likely if the content came from Sony Online Entertainment, but with Sony’s head in the clouds we may never know.

What do you think?

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Author Description

I am an artist, writer, avid comic book collector, martial artist (Kajukenbo) and one of the 5 co-founders of GOS. Plans for the future are to publish a comic book as a freelance artist/writer, and to be a world-class assassin.

  • Leejohnson222

    what ever their plans for this take over its a big and clever move. A cloud based system that can run smoothly can offer such a variety of games and other entertainment, it gives more choice to the consumer and they can offer a different service renting games or services rather than paying to download. Streaming demos would be popular i think as no download time, just hit play providing the service runs fast. I know so many people who don’t even try out demos as they cant be bother to wait for the download, which is crazy ! integrated with psn this could be a solid feature.

    • Jimbo

      “…providing the service runs fast…” 

      You guys do realize that Gaikai was shopping around for a buyer and looking for $500+ million?  They were hurting for cash because their business model was not able to deliver what they promised.  The main reason was the lack of enough broadband bandwidth at consumer homes.  

      This purchase will be a HUGE failure.  Why Sony decided to purchase this when they are in deep financial troubles themselves is beyond me.  PS1 and PS2 games are generally 480i/p and the bandwidth necessary to stream them is far less than say Metal Gear Solid 4.  Nonetheless, any latency or bandwidth changes to your Internet connection will impact the visuals of the game and the gameplay.  Amazing how many  people blindly seem to ignore this.  And how about the caps that your provider has on your account?  Have fun with that too.

      Download the game once, or buy it on Blu-ray and you can ignore the above issues altogether.

      • Sue Lenard

        @9bcce5749f86d7e873a51eda898dbad5:disqus 

        And don’t forget how the retailers will react to this move.  Sony is essentially looking to cut out the retailers by using streaming of games.  How do you think retailers will react?  Take a guess.  

        Most US retailers favor the XBOX 360 over the PS3.  The aisles are bigger and they have significantly more XBOX shelve space.  Microsoft has already told retailers that they will not be blocking used games and that they “the retailer” will continue to be the front line for all Microsoft XBOX sales and revenue.  

      • leejohnson222

         your comment is valid but in the east where sony are biggest anyway countries like Korea have fibre optic, they can pretty much watch streamed tv on the underground on a phone at this point, there broadband infrastructure is the best in the world. Ok this service if running slow will be poor and some ISP’s do have limits, but over in the UK there are so many deals on Unlimited broadband no download / upload limit,no caps at all, these are improving all the time,maybe not in the US, but Xbox is king there so its harder for sony to compete anyway. Look at xbox in japan it pretty much dead, even final fantasy sold more on ps3 as a whole and it was multiplat with less consoles sold than MS. Sony always look long term anyway, this will be slowly introduced as a new service on ps3 /ps4 its also going into all sony tv’s other devices, Gaikai did a deal with Samsung so you can bet its going into all their tv sets also. However i did wonder how a company clearly not as financially stable as MS would do this deal. Although MS seem to be less and less about games and more about cable and features these days.

  • Vampiric

    So rebuying old games is great? its no different than what psn allows

  • Knife206

    Sony makes great hardware.  They design it and build it very, very well.  But wow, they suck at management, marketing and online services.

    If they could only get those weaknesses (which just happen to be Microsoft’s strength) taken care of, they might be a player next generation.  

    But given that they produced literally no major/minor updates to the XMB over the last 2 years, good luck with the PSN transition of features and services from PS3 to PS4.  Sony is not good at software.  Period.  And it shows.  They need to hire some really good talent to catch up in that area.

    XBOX Live saved Microsoft from the RRoD fiasco.  That and the fact that all your game saves, content, DLC, whatever were tied to your Gamertag and not your console ID (like PlayStation).  That meant that you could simply detach the hard drive from your failed XBOX and pop it onto (or into nowadays) the new one, turn it on, and start gaming instantly again.  Good luck doing that with the PS3.  If you move the hard drive to another console, or a replacement console, you must format the hard drive.  Losing all your data.  Backups rarely work when restored and take forever.  Again, this is Sony making incredibly poor software design choices.  It was almost like they were stumbling around with rookie software engineers throughout the whole PS3 development and production lifecycle.  That’s what trying to save you money does.

    Sony played catchup this whole generation and will end it with a tie.  Which is not a victory for Sony considering how they fared last generation.  Microsoft, the upstart, is now a force to be reckoned with.  And they will, repeat, will dominate next generation if they get out early again, and with no hardware issues (they always learn from their mistakes, that won’t happen again, trust me).  And if rumors are true, and the XBOX 720 becomes a DVR for cable and satellite providers as well as your home media server … all at the same time.  Sony is done.  Just being a game console is not acceptable by consumers anymore.  

    I love Sony and the PlayStation, don’t get me wrong.  But they really, REALLY need to step their game up next generation.  Or they will go the way of SEGA……

  • Comicbookguy

    @DCI:twitter 

    When you say “avid comic book collector”, what does that mean?  What is the difference between just a normal collector and an “avid” collector?

    Can you clarify that a little?

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=522654580 Charles King

      There isn’t that much difference honestly lol. A good amount of collectors only stick to the comics they like. I collect my favorites (X-men and Nightwing for example), plus Im always looking for new titles to read no matter what genre they may be in. Maybe I shouldn’t of used the word “avid” to make my point but Twitter only allows so much space…

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