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Sony Computer Entertainment's $380 million acquisition of a game-streaming service is a bold, decisive move into cloud gaming for the PlayStation maker. As for what that means to gamers, there are many possibilities.
Sony's gaming unit said Monday that it had agreed to acquire Gaikai, a company founded in 2008 to provide streaming games. (Rumors that Sony would acquire Gaikai emerged just before last month's Electronic Entertainment Expo, suggesting that Sony would make the announcement at its press conference.) $380 million is not a bad payday for a service that, just a couple of years ago, people were suggesting was snake oil: Running high-end video games on remote servers, taking players' controller input, doing all the processing remotely, then spitting back the game screens onto any device with fast internet and a display.
But it works. You can try it right now: Gaikai's site and Facebook app will let you stream time-limited demo versions of major console games like Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Alan Wake and Mass Effect 3. If your connection is fast enough, it doesn't matter how powerful your PC is; you can be playing these games in seconds, and they function just fine.
In its statement on Monday, Sony made it clear that it intends to establish a "world-class cloud-streaming service" so that players can run "immersive core games with rich graphics" across an array of devices. Perhaps Sony views streaming as crucial to the future of gaming as Netflix is to movies. Or perhaps it's hedging its bets, playing defensively: Sony's rival Samsung announced prior to E3 that it would add high-end games into its television sets using Gaikai, a deal whose future would now seem to be in question.
Here are some likely (and not) applications of Gaikai tech in the PlayStation universe.
The most immediately obvious implementation of Gaikai is running Sony's PlayStation games on any device. Have to leave the house in the middle of your game of Uncharted 3? Just connect your DualShock to your iPad via Bluetooth and load the streaming version. It's playing on a PS3 located in a Sony facility. Now, of course there are various bottlenecks in this process that would cause this to fall apart, mostly involving the strength of the Internet connection or your proximity to the servers. But the proof of concept shows that it works if the conditions are right, and the internet is doing nothing if not growing faster and more widespread every day.
Gaikai could also enable what some pundits are calling, rather erroneously in my view, "backward compatibility" between PlayStation devices. Current models of PlayStation 3 cannot run PlayStation 2 software, but Sony could make those games playable on PS3 via streaming. This would in fact be a compelling usage of the technology, allowing Sony and any publisher that produced content during the PlayStation 2 era to get it back into players' hands without having to go through the trouble of porting it to PlayStation 3 first. This wouldn't be "backward compatibility" – well, not unless Sony devised a system that, upon insertion of a PlayStation 2 game disc into the machine, played that game via the cloud for free. Somehow I doubt that.
I don't know if Sony could get away with selling streaming-only content at a la carte prices – it's tough to stomach the idea of paying a set price for something that you will lose access to if the Internet goes out or the PlayStation Network takes a vacation. That said, an all-you-can-eat, subscription-based Netflix-style streaming service with a huge library of forgotten content sounds like a much more appealing proposition.
With a streaming service, PlayStation could be all of your previous gaming machines rolled up into one.If you're stuck on the idea of Sony streaming PlayStation 2 games to PlayStation 3, you're not thinking big enough. The same technology that could run PlayStation games on anything can also run anything on PlayStation. Why can't everything that's ever been available on PC show up en masse one day on your PS3? 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? With a streaming service, PlayStation could be all of your previous gaming machines rolled up into one. 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. And those demos could run anywhere, too; you could demo a PlayStation 4 game on your PC, a PlayStation 4 game on your Vita.
"I’d be amazed if the PlayStation 4 has a physical disc drive," then-Sony exec Phil Harrison told Wired in 2006. I predict he will be amazed. PlayStation 4 games, when they do begin to arrive, will be too damn big to just download and store locally – it'll be an option, but not the only one. Streaming could eventually replace the game console, but I would disagree with anyone that suggested this deal means that PlayStation 4 will just be a streaming box.
Gaikai still needs ideal conditions to run, so while streaming will be a fine supplement to local gameplay on Sony's next console, the gigantic triple-A PlayStation 4 experiences will still need to be sold on discs and the hardware will still need to be sold directly to consumers, for everyone who either doesn't have a fast internet connection or doesn't want to worry about lag affecting their play.
This is another sticking point. I've been playing You Don't Know Jack on Facebook, a streaming-video trivia game that is a great deal of fun until lag causes me to select the wrong answer for a question, at which point I am ready to set my entire computer on fire. If that's how I feel about You Don't Know Jack, how would Call of Duty players react to streaming issues?
That said, dismissing streaming gameplay as not ready for prime time simply because it isn't ready to work for one specific genre of games also misses the point. Streaming may be bad for competitive shooters but it's perfectly serviceable for single-player games, especially those that can take a split second of lag and not have the player notice.
If used properly, Gaikai tech could have two enormous benefits – it could vastly open up the number of devices that could play PlayStation content, and vastly expand the amount of content available on PlayStation. But it certainly won't be the single raison d'etre of PlayStation 4.
PlayStation 5, maybe.
