While I personally have flopped onto both sides of the cloud gaming experiment from time to time, there is one thing that I think I have been consistent on – that there is a lot of potential for it in the future.
Well it seems that I was not the only one that thought that way, as today it was announced that Sony had purchased cloud gaming company Gaikai.
While lesser known here in the UK than OnLive, it is a company that works on the same basic principal – Rather than making sure your hardware is always top of the line to ensure that it is able to run the latest and greatest games you leave that to them.
All you have to provide is a means to steam the video stream output by the large server-bank running your game, and a way to send your button commands for it to process. Think of it like having your actual PS3 next door and playing it wirelesly.
Now while the infrastructure is still not optimum for a service like this to work for gaming, one day it will be and Sony know this and are hoping to make the first steps into the cloud streaming market before its competitors. There are many ways it could use the tech now – from demo games that don’t require multi-gig downloads and even playing PS3 games on none PS3 devices such as their TV’s
It will be interesting to see where this goes in the next year and yes, I am sticking my neck out and saying we will see something within a year from this deal.
