Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan has revealed that they have ‘aggressive’ plans for PlayStation in the cloud gaming space soon.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Jim explained it to his shareholders in a recent business call:
“We observe mobility in gaming habits to be an increasingly important trend, and the cloud will be fundamental to allowing us, or indeed anybody else, to exploit that trend.
Unfortunately, today is not the place for me to disclose these plans, but we do have some fairly interesting and quite aggressive plans to accelerate our initiatives in the space of the cloud that will unfold over the course of the coming months.”
Sony tried to be the frontrunner in cloud gaming years ago. When the very first entrants in the cloud gaming market, Onlive and Gaikai, closed up after financial failure years ago, they acquired both companies’ assets.
In 2012, over a decade ago, Sony closed the deal to purchase Gaikai as a whole. Microsoft felt compelled to respond that cloud was already a core part of their experience at this time, via Xbox Live’s cloud based features.
In 2015, OnLive as a whole did not come up for acquisition, but Sony was able to acquire most of its assets.
It is these two services and the technology they had built up that became the basis for Sony’s current cloud gaming service, PlayStation Now.
Sony had also been bold with PlayStation Now, pushing the technology early so that, for example, PlayStation 3 owners could stream their games on their PlayStation Vita where they could get an external connection.
PlayStation Now streaming for PlayStation 3 games also arrived for select Sony televisions, PlayStation Vita TV, and PlayStation 4.
In its current incarnation, PlayStation Now can be run on a Windows computer, or any Android or iOS based devices, using proprietary apps you have to install. Sony has also primarily sold the service to consumers as a way to play their classic games, from PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Portable.
Of course, if we were to be so bold, it’s also well known that rival Microsoft has been far more successful in the cloud gaming field. Building their own proprietary game streaming technology xCloud, and then using it as a selling point for their Game Pass service.
One key reason for Xbox’s lead in this regard is the fact that Microsoft as a whole has built their entire business around cloud services, since CEO Satya Nadella took the reins of the company.
Sony could very well catch up to Xbox’s lead, perhaps by making PlayStation Plus an even more attractive service. It seems we won’t be waiting that long to find out what they have in mind.
