Slashdot Mirror
Sony To Acquire Cloud Gaming Company Gaikai for $380 Million
Sony announced today that they've entered into an agreement to acquire Gaikai, Dave Perry's cloud gaming company, for $380 million. Sony said they will use the company to "establish a new cloud service" which will provide a "broad array of content ranging from immersive core games with rich graphics to casual content anytime, anywhere on a variety of internet-connected devices." The Digital Foundry blog discusses what this means for the gaming industry:
"What the deal represents is acceptance from a major console platform holder that gaming is fast approaching its own Netflix or iPod moment — the point where convenience and accessibility to content becomes more important than the inevitable hit to fidelity demanded by the underlying technology. ... The quality of the experience comes down to two specific factors: image integrity and control response. The former is going to require significant increases in bandwidth, because the current 5mbps level needs to rise to 10-15mbps to really solve the artifacting issues that are present in the first-gen cloud systems as they stand right now. But in a world where top-end UK internet connections have leapt from 2mbps to 100mbps in less than a decade, this is only a matter of time."
Sony is notorious for awful takeovers, and this one could also turn into a black hole.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Content distributors move toward bandwidth-devouring "cloud" services.
If ever one needed evidence that modern capitalism is an exercise in bleeding consumers dry, here ya go.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
When you are in your death throes, you tend to make bad decisions, Sony is no exception.
How they are planning to address latency would be more important to me. Games like Arkham Asylum and City only work because the you don't need fine controller actions to play.
I imagine that they'll handle it just as you said: choose games in genres not associated with "fine controller actions". It'd be the same way that mobile developers have had to choose games in genres not requiring "fine controller actions" due to the limits of a completely flat touch screen.
They could use it to put rootkits on your computer... from a cloud!
Don't worry, Sony will make the situation way better! First, Sony will make the library exclusively Sony games! You too can now play such gems as "The Punisher: No Mercy" and "Trash Panic"!
But it gets better! By making it exclusively on the Playstation 3, Sony will be able to allow the console to download the game locally, and play it there!
Now, some critics may ask, "How is this different from the game store that was there". This is a valid question! You see, now it has "Cloud" in the name!
It sure seems like it with the incessant push to take physical, tangible games out of people's hands and replace them with ephemeral bits that are either downloaded (through a gate that others control, and thus revokable) or streamed (where you never see the actual game code at all, and thus once again revokable). When there aren't physical games for people to own and resell onto others, then one day future generations will see video games like current ones do the majority of the DuMont network's TV programming - not at all, as it won't exist in any form.
FC Closer
but then it wouldn't be as cool
streamed bits are a lot cooler than playing them local
it's like streaming a movie vs watching a blu ray. the streamed is so much better
"Sony...death throes..."
Please God, let it be so.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/10/business/la-fi-ct-sony-earns-20120510
Over the past 2 years, Sony is $10 BILLION in the hole, and with the bad decisions they constantly make, I wont be suprised if they are gone in a few years.
Cloud Gaming should be used for demos and such to get people interested ... the upside there is that we don't have to download Gigabytes just to discover a game sucks. Should Sony stick with this kind of model rather than force us to go completely cloud-based, then it'll be a good thing. While many gamers may be tempted to "sell out" to the concept of cloud gaming that OnLive and others are pushing because of the convenience, you should go play Diablo 3 for a while and have that lovely experience of servers being down. Watching things like this weekends Netflix outage does not at all bode well for Cloud Gaming.
I hear tons of talk about Onlive and Gaikai from investor and analyst types but who is actually playing on these systems because I've never heard anyone actually say they use these systems.
To make a mouse and keyboard work on a PS3 you need to put them into one of the PS3's USB boards, or pair them via Bluetooth. Only Unreal Tournament 3 supports actually playing a game with them. But they do work, just like they were compatible with the PS2.
High-end, not really. Even the current batch of Intel integrated GPUs can handle 1080p video decompression. You can do it with a $50 bottom-of-the-line GeForce.
Gaming, though, still requires a decent GPU. $100-$150 for the low end. So hardware costs won't decrease if you just stream the game data (as opposed to streaming video).
But what *would* matter is latency. If the rendering is done IN THE CLOUD!, that means latency becomes an even bigger deal. Instead of just having to deal with controller->computer->monitor latency, you're dealing with controller->computer->SERVER->computer->monitor latency. And since computer->server latency is going to be in the realm of 20-60ms, I would venture to say that twitchy games are going to suffer *heavily*. Civilization VI or Final Fantasy XV will be fine, but Quake V or Unreal Tournament 2014? No way.
Just to pre-empt a potential argument, NO, current multiplayer games don't have that latency issue for most things. Currently, clients handle the rendering and input. They also run a shadow copy of the server to "predict" the response it will give, so it can give feedback *immediately*. The client doesn't send a constant stream of "OK, he moved the mouse over a pixel", it sends a "he just fired his weapon from position X at angle Y, who does he hit?". The server does sanity checks to prevent cheating (like going all the way across the map in one frame), and the client will periodically send "I'm at position X, angle Y", but the bulk of the time, the client is the one deciding what the player will see happening. Which can (and does) cause problems when they don't communicate right, but they've gotten good at recovering from that.
Could this be one of those "buy out a threatening technology and bury it" maneuvers? I don't know how Gaikai and friends pay for the rights to the games they offer, but I strongly suspect they're giving Sony and other rightsholders a lot less money than Sony would make selling the actual games to consumers. Gaikai's business model is a lot like the old video rental stores, and Sony and friends spent two decades trying to destroy those.