It’s finally done and finally official. Sony buys up cloud-gaming wunderkind Gaikai for a hefty sum.
Cloud-gaming service Gaikai is now apart of Sony Computer Entertainment with a $380 million dollar buy-out that was announced on Monday morning. Surmounting speculation about Sony arranging a potential deal of this very manner – either with Gaikai or their videogame streaming rival, OnLive – had been building up a storm before E3 2012, but nothing of the sort was mentioned at any point during Sony’s media briefing.
Better late than never though, and with Monday’s announcement, comes a load of questions and hardly any answers (naturally, that’s how the biz works). While Sony was gushy with praise over the acquirement of Gaikai and how special the talents of the private company based in Orange County, California were, nothing specific about the deal regarding the inner-workings of this new SCE cloud-gaming service were discussed in the PR release.
Assuming this is SCE we’re talking about, who’s directly in charge of the PlayStation-side of the Sony Corporation, I would wager that much of Gaikai’s expertise would be poised for use for the PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Vita… Heck, perhaps Sony’s next gaming machine that is still in development, the PlayStation 4 (not the official name), while we’re tossing out hypotheticals like Professor Albert Einstein on Mountain Dew: Code Red.
Without knowing the finer particulars really, it’s hard to pin down exactly how cloud-gaming could be used for the PlayStation platform, beside the sampling of game demos. There certainly is the home run threat of being able to access PlayStation content – videos, music, and yes, games – on any compatible device, say a smart phone or tablet, regardless of brand. That would be a huge selling point, for sure.
One last question I would pose is that of the role of Gaikai co-founder Dave Perry, notable game creator of Earthworm Jim, MDK, and Wild 9. No solid information on whether Mr. Perry, who started the cloud-gaming service in 2008 two years after he left his own studio, Shiny Entertainment, would be remaining at the company post-purchase, join up with Sony in some working/overseeing capacity, or depart ways altogether.
Don’t you depart from Walyou, we’ve got tons of geeky content that can viewed on any piece of hardware (I think) like this awesome Limo DeLorean or these 12 amazing drawings of Spider-Man villains. Hey! Just in time for the big-screen release of The Amazing Spider-man on July 3!
