E3 2012: Sony is "looking at what OnLive is doing"

Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has admitted that cloud gaming could very well play a part in PlayStation’s immediate future.

Specifically, he conceded that Sony is looking at what OnLive is doing”, adding fuel to the recent reports linking Sony to a cloud gaming acquisition.

We’re looking at what OnLive is doing, and the tech around that, and considering how this can be a part of PlayStation,” he told our fledgling sister site MCV Pacific.

I think when it becomes a reality, what it’d do is allow us to reach a broader audience on devices Playstation platforms, reaching broader audiences than we currently can.”

Streaming tech, though, is but one of many new technologies that Sony is investigating as part of its next-gen planning.

I think those avenues are valid and it’s definitely a good idea to make use of cloud gaming technologies,” he added. We’ve been looking at the variety of technologies we could include in the Playstation ecosystem. We looked at different motion sensing tech and our vision analysis technologies to create PS Move for example.

We’ve been looking at streaming tech as well, and one of the examples we had was what we call remote play. Remote Play was where you connect your PSP through the internet to your PS3. It is like a cloud gaming service at a fundamental level in terms of how the mechanic itself works.

Cloud gaming services allow us to stream games via a server to different devices, but in order for it to become practical, the internet has to be very robust in terms of bandwidth and latency.

As with all things infrastructure, it takes time for it to become widely available. Some consumers in the US and some parts of Europe have very robust and fast net speeds, so cloud gaming would be practical in those markets, but not when you look at the wider, broader global market.

Cloud gaming, because it’s so easy for consumers and is so convenient (ie you don’t have to do any big downloads, installation or setup). When there are faster internet connections, gaming in the cloud as a subscription service could become a reality.”