Microsoft has seemingly bet the entire Xbox farm on cloud gaming, but it looks like PlayStation won’t be following suit. In a new interview published today by the Financial Times, Sony Chairman and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida expressed caution regarding cloud gaming technology, claiming that it remains “very tricky” from a technical standpoint. While Sony has obviously invested already in different possibilities for streaming games, including projects that include GT Sophy, Sony’s artificial intelligence agent, Yoshida’s remarks would suggest that Sony’s current focus lies with evaluating options and refining its approach before fully committing to cloud gaming.
“I think cloud itself is an amazing business model, but when it comes to games, the technical difficulties are high,” said Yoshida, citing latency — the fast response times demanded by gamers — as the biggest issue. “So there will be challenges to cloud gaming, but we want to take on those challenges.”
From a Financial Times report (alternate link):
While it launched a cloud gaming subscription service in 2014 that is now integrated with its upgraded and expanded service PS Plus Premium, analysts say Sony has not capitalised on its early bet to establish itself as a leader in the field.
Yoshida also pointed to the costly inefficiencies of cloud gaming where servers are idle for much of the day before having to cope with the high levels of traffic of gamers playing during the evening or “dark time”. He added that Sony had responded by unleashing GT Sophy in the quiet hours to learn how to beat human competitors in the auto-racing simulator Gran Turismo.
“The dark time for cloud gaming had been an issue for Microsoft as well as Google, but it was meaningful that we were able to use those [quieter] hours for AI learning,” said Yoshida, speaking at the company’s headquarters in Tokyo.
Discussion (3 replies)
Join Discussion →Difference is... MS can afford to risk the farm on Cloud gaming and invest whatever they need to, in order to make it right.
I mean heck... MS's market cap is greater than Canada or freaking Russia.
We're quickly approaching a time where these companies will have their own paramilitary police forces to protect their assets and be granted Extraterritoriality type rights for their wholly owned assets.
"May I see your drivers license."
"Afraid not officer, as a Microsoft Leve C employee I have exemption from state laws."
I tried Xbox Cloud at a friend's house on his 9th-gen Xbox (forget if it was XBSS or XBSX), and it was surprisingly very good. However my friend pointed out that both the Microsoft servers and the Verizon FiOS backbone were very close by to his house. Anyways streaming - be it videos or games - is definitely not for me. So I don't give a sh1t if game companies don't wanna invest in it. There are wiser ways for them to spend their money.
What tha fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck...
Also don't forget Microsoft has a massive investment in Azure (and Government Azure). So it's in their interest to have a highly distributed, geofenced, high speed, cloud presence with full redundancy. I mean heck it's probably considered a QOS watermark to monitor the Xbox cloud streaming performance for complaints to get ahead of any issues before an enterprise customer would notice them. Because NOBODY bitches like a FPS player who got killed because "IT WAS THE GAME YOU SUCK!".