What will sony do with gaikai

That was why Gaikai originally streamed games from YouTube and Facebook ads — they were legitimately ads! It worked with an off-the-shelf Android tablet. Best Buy and Walmart had live game demos you could play on their websites, and you could share demos on Facebook with your friends and relatives they could play right inside the social network if you liked.

I stopped giving speeches, I stopped pushing this as the future of the industry But it took until late for Sony to finally let you play PlayStation games on a PC , and it was mid before it added a back catalog of current-gen PS4 titles instead of exclusively older games. Or how the company wound up diverting its attention to VR. He also points out that Sony never put much marketing behind PS Now or ran a real ad until last month. Sony also never wound up offering a bundle with its other subscription services like PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Vue, for that matter.

When I ask Perry what happened to the key part of his original vision — the idea that PS4 players would be able to instantly sample games for free — he admits that Sony never actually tried. Sony had seven unchallenged years to convince publishers, but now Google, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Nintendo, Amazon, Verizon, Walmart, Nvidia, and others are all testing the waters for their own possible cloud gaming subscriptions. None of this is to say Sony wasted those seven years or made the wrong decisions.

The PlayStation 4 wound up becoming a phenomenal success. This leaves Sony with two different routes to bring PS4 games to the cloud: first, by creating its own datacentre-specific version of the hardware, or alternatively by generating two different versions of each game.

The first approach may make more sense for Sony's first-party studios - they can continue to target the strengths of the fixed architecture and rely upon beefed-up datacentre PS4 hardware to provide the 60Hz upgrade they need to bridge the latency gap. The second approach may prove more favourable, however: third-party publishers already create PC versions of their games and adapting them to the Gaikai datacentre standard would be a reasonably low-effort procedure.

Back-compat via PC emulation is the best route for catalogue titles. Embracing the cloud as a cross-platform format does have some limitations, however - upstream bandwidth on home internet connections is typically very low so the inputs sent client-side would be limited. It's difficult to imagine that camera-based games will be able to stream their data up to the servers, for example something Microsoft must be pondering bearing in mind its Kinect 2 plans. For Sony, this may require some thought about how it would handle any prospective motion control peripheral.

Not only that, but there's also the fact that native 60FPS games thrive on precision response - Street Fighter or Call of Duty, for example - simply won't play as well via the cloud, no matter how much infrastructure improves. Multiplayer games could also feature additional latency between players, and won't match the work netcode engineers have done with cutting-edge P2P experiences - like Uncharted 3's multiplayer mode, for example. Cloud servers can locally host hundreds of gigabytes worth of data, and assuming SSD-style hardware, it could access that vast reserve of storage immediately, opening up a wealth of potential for bespoke online-only games.

Secondly, cloud servers will almost certainly enjoy highly significant spec advantages over any home console - so the base visuals being encoded could potentially benefit from the likes of extended draw distances, higher-resolution textures etc. With the ink still drying on the documents, it's unlikely that we will see any major changes to Sony's existing console or PlayStation Network service offerings at any time in the immediate future, though current Gaikai demo streaming could be implemented pretty painlessly.

Completing the acquisition won't happen overnight either, and coming up with the ways and means in which PlayStation software and datacentre servers can work together is also going to take time.

Sony is also going to have to figure out how to handle Gaikai's existing licensees - it's hard to imagine that the company will have much of an interest in handling the cloud streaming services of HDTV rivals Samsung and LG. Suffice to say, it's early days and it's almost certain that the only reason we actually know about this acquisition at all is because of shareholder and regulatory obligations.

But Sony and Gaikai have time on their hands. In the UK at least, fibre-optic infrastructure rollout is proceeding apace and this represents the fundamental building block that could turn a cool piece of tech into a viable, PlayStation-quality experience. Members of Sony's Advanced Technology Group and Sony Santa Monica were seemingly caught by surprise by the announcement this morning, if their tweets are taken at face value.

In our direct head-to-head analysis of OnLive and Gaikai, the newly acquired Sony outfit won out in terms of base image quality graphical features, settings etc , encoding quality and response, but lost out in terms of overall frame-rates. OnLive is apparently rolling out improved servers, while Gaikai says it can provide 60Hz video. Use the full-screen button for a full p comparison.

There's also a phenomenal opportunity for fundamental change here. Sony has been very progressive with its PlayStation Plus offering, but it's difficult to make the most of its current subscription offers when they are accompanied by multi-gigabyte downloads, lengthy installs and sometimes even patching. In these respects, Gaikai could change everything. In the meantime, all eyes shift to Microsoft and how it might possibly respond. OnLive was targeted as a potential acquisition target in the recent "Xbox " leak , but despite being first out of the blocks, the service came up short in key, quantifiable aspects in a direct Face-Off with Gaikai.

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So we did. Our videos are multi-gigabyte files and we've chosen a high quality provider to ensure fast downloads. We think it's a small price to pay for unlimited access to top-tier quality encodes of our content. Thank you. Find out more about the benefits of our Patreon. Sometimes we include links to online retail stores. If you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. There's no reason why the Sony-side servers have to be PlayStation hardware.

Just make them high-end PCs. Set up Netflix-style deals with content holders and let them dump everything onto the service all at once. Bugs in the emulation? Don't hold games back while you tweak them, just dump everything, let players report bugs and fix them on the server side.

Why not the entire content libraries of every classic game console not made by Nintendo? Certain Sega Genesis or TurboGrafx games are already downloadable on PS3, but having a streaming unlimited service means there's no need to pick and choose which games will be most popular. Just upload everything and let players dabble. I watch all kinds of stupid crap on Netflix that I would never pay a la carte prices for. And this adds value for me, the ability to just jump around and experience new things, even if they're not very good.

Why do I care? I didn't really pay for it. While Gaikai says on its FAQ page that the service will work with full games, right now it seems to be only used for timed demos. If you click the Buy Now links, you don't unlock the full game for streaming, you're just shuttled off to somewhere that you can buy the downloadable version — without any guarantee that your machine will be able to play it.

Demos may in fact turn out to be the most compelling feature of Gaikai-on-PlayStation. You might be able to try new triple-A games without having to wait at all, or use up your storage space on demos. Frictionless demos — the ability to just start trying something without having to wait around — could be quite effective at selling full versions of games. After purchasing, players could even stream the game and begin playing while waiting for the full version to download, for a gapless experience.