Sony Talks Gaikai Plans

While the specific arm of Sony that recently acquired Gaikai was indeed Sony Computer Entertainment, the company isn’t just planning on using the technology for gaming.

Head of Sony Computer Entertainment Andrew House has said that utilizing the Gaikai technology with Sony products outside of the gaming window is “absolutely within the frame” (see what I did there: window…. frame…I’ll get my coat).

“It’s recognition on Sony’s part that the cloud and cloud streaming technologies are going to have profound and possibly a very positive impact on not only our game business, but also in the way our consumers interact with and obtain content in general,” House told the Wall Street Journal.

First on the agenda is the setting up of a game streaming service, however, said House.

Will Sony be bringing streaming to their Bravia televisions? Gaikai already had a deal with Samsung, what’s going to happen to that? No comment from House.

There’s been much speculation on Sony streaming back catalogue titles from the PS1 and PS2 to the PS3, and plenty of talk on streaming games from any of the three consoles to Sony phones or tablets.

What’s Microsoft’s plan then? Will they go for rival service OnLive? Probably not, they’ll be setting their price high now. There seems to be a lot of chatter pointing at Microsoft doing something in-house.

Microsoft Studios boss Phil Spencer has made comments that support this idea:

“To be honest,” Spencer said to GamesIndustry International, “it is at an incubation period. Gaikai is doing great work and I’m not downplaying what they’ve done, but it is not yet at global scale where you can promise someone that when they buy this TV and plug it into their own internet connection that they are going to get a reliable service that a normal, non-technical person would accept for playing all types of games.

“We’re a scale company, we want to make a promise that we can actually reach everybody. Anybody can buy a Kinect, plug it in, and it will work. Cloud is in the future, there is no doubt about that. And as a company, Microsoft has Azure; we have data centers, Office 365, Hotmail. There is no question about big data, large scale services that Microsoft has invested in.

“On our side, future of entertainment is the cloud. You see that with music and movies, and games will be that way as well. We are a ways away from everybody being able to play all the games that we are showing off on the floor of E3 via the cloud reliably. We’re involved in the investigations and the experiments, but I don’t think it’s at scale yet.

“It will be, but it is not an ‘if,’ it’s a ‘when.’