Could Sony be interested in bringing cloud gaming to the PlayStation 3? The latest round of rumors thinks it’s quite possible.
Let’s play a little game of Connect the Dots. Topic: Pre-E3 rumors. First, gaming-media outlets everywhere reported a surprising rumor that Sony would announce a cloud gaming partnership – with either of the two top-dog cloud gaming services, OnLive or Gaikai – during their E3 2012 press conference on Monday, June 4.
Then, a few days later, one of those aforementioned cloud gaming services, Gaikai, was learned by the French website, Gameblog, to have been invited to E3, teasing a huge announcement that would have “the potential to change the future of video games”… blah, blah, blah. Okay, so, I guess from penciling the lines, this must mean some form cloud gaming is coming to a Sony gaming platform near you.
Allegedly, of course; this is still a rumor, but a juicy one at that.
Cloud gaming, for the unknowing, allows the streaming of games – typically of the PC kind – to any device via a broadband connection and software client. A fairly new venture on the block, there are currently two major gaming-on-demand players in North America, OnLive, which launched in 2010, and the fresh up-start Gaikai, who became official as of last year.
Going by scuttlebutt alone, it would seem that Gaikai is in the clear running, and the idea of a Sony aliment would be keenly fascinating, because Gaikai doesn’t offer games for sale through its streaming service like OnLive. Instead, it lets customers try a range of game demos from different big-name publishers; all direct through a Internet browser, Facebook too, with no monster computing rig required.
Here’s the skinny, though. Would a potential Sony/Gaikai tag team just be for the purpose of game demos? My Micheal Pachter-sense (yes, I was bitten by a radioactive gaming research analyst) is tingling wildly on this one, so I’m thinking no-way-José. There’s so many routes this story could go, and so many hot burning questions that beg to be asked.
Seriously, just game demos? How about actual full-retail games? How about a PlayStation Vita version? Heck knows that needs all the help it can get. Great googly moogly, what about PCs?! And if that’s so, does that mean that the whole PlayStation library will become one universal streaming platform, accessible on anything that Sony deems worthy?! …I said, wow.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Temper that geek-out though, we still have a couple weeks to go until E3, and it won’t do you or me any good if we spoiled all the fevered fun this early. Relax, let the days go by – while catching up on Star Wars’ 35th Anniversary and a My Little Pony made out of bacon – and get ready for one of the biggest gaming events of the year.
