Sony Computer Entertainment Acquires Cloud Gaming Company Gaikai For $380 Million

Any idea how big is Samsung for example?

A with all the issue Japan faces for decades now, and their late lack of direction. Yes I can see them fail. Japanese government would not let that happens though it's not that easy but on their merits alone they could.

Could GMC fail? They did...
 
Of course Sony can fail. But then I would imagine their Playstation unit would live on independently (at least for a while)
 
Kb-Smoker said:
Dont know why people talk about BC. I dont see why they would waste their times on that....
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There's a whole other thread discussing the importance of BC.

The best way to use this service is for demo and ps+ one hour previews. The demos for consoles game are now 7GB-15GB and will keep getting bigger next gen.
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What demo's are you playing?! :oops: Largest demo I've come across is maybe 2 GBs. 7-15 GBs is more likely the entire game.

Persistantthug said:
It would be bad to tell people, "hey, buy our stuff, it's awesome......but we don't guarantee it will work 5 or 6 years from now".
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There's a whole thread discussing that too, but as Sony were never selling PSN content as being forwards compatible any more than they've sold any other content as being forward compatible, there's no reason for consumers to assume their PS3 content should work on PS4, nor reason to think content sold as part of a network service or play-anywhere service like PSMobile wouldn't be trusted. And even then it can't be trusted, because they may remove content from the streaming service one day. Whatever Sony do with this, they can communicate the message effectively.

I also question whether this is any good for BC. What hardware are Sony going to run their PS3 games on to stream? The mother of all emulators on a truly monster PC rig? Old IBM Cell servers going cheap? Or a PS3 for each user? It won't be cost effective. Just let anyone wanting to play PS3 games use their existing PS3 until such a time as PS3 emulation becomes as cheap as PS1 emulation is now and offer people a nostalgia trip.
 
More and more often the trend is for demos to be the full game minus an unlock key, as people are willing to endure a longer download for a free demo of something they've never played, but then once they're playing the demo, they need to be able to buy a near instant continue and not have to wait for the full game to download.

This, crucially, is something that a demo on GaiKai would not solve. At best, you would continue to play on GaiKai until the full game was finished downloading, but then GaiKai would need to be able to save your progress to the cloud and the game should read from it. There are definitely some tricky bits to solve in that regard. But if I look at the performance of GaiKai with lower resolutions, right now, it's impressive, and so there are a fair few PS2 and most multi-platform PS3 games that would play from GaiKai perfectly. Streaming PS3 games from Sony like Uncharted and God of War would face the considerable challenge of first running on PC hardware, or Sony setting up special PS3s that can run these games and run them really well, preferably at a constant 60fps.

It is not at all unlikely for Sony to offer a mix of GaiKai and native games and mix-n-match, having dedicated PS4 games like the Uncharted and God of War's run locally and native on PS4, but have various other PS3 and lesser demanding multi-platform titles run on GaiKai. Developers wouldn't even have to port all their games to PS4, but just distribute them on GaiKai, should they so desire.
 
Honestly if one has the network infrastructure that would allow for a comfortable Gakkai/Onlive use, downloading even a big demo should not prove to be a concerned.
Not instant as Gakkai/Onlive is but not a major issue either.

I'm actually concerned about Gakkai over Onlive, there seems to have a quiet impressive marketing department. The tech seems a bit better than Onlive but it's not like Onlive could not easily catch up.

My concern is that Onlive is actually a working service, you can subscribe I did. Theirs servers handle significant loads, etc. It works. Gakkai on the other hand, is barely a proof of concept. You can't look at their financial and say OK running multiple render farms handling a given load of connections and say: "OK that's how much it costs"

To me it looks like Gakkai wanted to be bought, I wonder about they real intend to deliver the service to costumer. I hope Sony choose wisely as Onlive was ready to use, apps were working on many OS, etc.
 
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Kb-Smoker said:
PS+ I believe the demo are the game. Saint row 2 was 15GB. Infamouse 2 demo was 7.5GB

Those are last 2 I played.
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Yes, you have those too - on PS+ you have 1 hour demos. They are the full game, but you're simply limited to playing them for one hour, then you have to pay. I tried out Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood like that, among others. Pretty neat in principle, if you have a fast download at least. ;)
 
Hm, little bit worried about Sony's direction?
GAIKAI points towards casual game support, as for 'hardcore' gamer the tec seems to be not appropriate yet...lag is awful and a pain in mp, but getting lag in sp seems like a nightmare comes true?!?!
 
Billy Idol said:
Hm, little bit worried about Sony's direction?
GAIKAI points towards casual game support, as for 'hardcore' gamer the tec seems to be not appropriate yet...lag is awful and a pain in mp, but getting lag in sp seems like a nightmare comes true?!?!
Click to expand...

Its not like SP games dont have lag.
http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/bulletstorm-xbox-360-vs-gaikai-input-lag-video

Instead of rendering game at 30fps like on consoles [33ms per frame], Gaikai renders game on PC servers with 60fps [16ms] and then the remainder of that latency is spent on sending data to the user [1ms = ~300km of data traveling trough fiber optic line, but the last "copper mile" to the user adds a lot of latency]. Best case scenario is same latency as with 30fps console game. 60fps console games however... that kind of latency can't be achieved with cloud computing.

Also if you cant emulate system on PC, you cant get fast encoding [nvidia gpu based] or 60fps rendering. That puts PS3 gaming in great disadvantage, at least untill Sony finds the way to emulate PS3 on PC hardware [toss CELL emulation on some beefy AMD APU, and task GPU portion to emulate SPU's].
 
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Arwin said:
Yes, you have those too - on PS+ you have 1 hour demos. They are the full game, but you're simply limited to playing them for one hour, then you have to pay. I tried out Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood like that, among others. Pretty neat in principle, if you have a fast download at least. ;)
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That is the problem, to try them out you have to take about a day to download and install. With this streaming service i would try them all out. That is if they can get it to work good as it does with the pc version.

Seems like the big problem is a lot of console games only run at 30fps. Going by DF article this would add too much lag.
 
Not real surprising move. Figured both OnLive & Gaikai were prime targets for acquisition when they first launched. It's definitely the future whether some admit or not. IMHO, it puts a few more nails in the coffin for dedicated gaming consoles. I suspect we'll see Microsoft go after OnLive next. From a service & marketing perspective it makes sense, just not sure the patent portfolio would be entirely worth it though. I'm sure Microsoft has enough patents & research to roll their own. Buying Onlive would mainly keep their competitors from getting hold of the tech. Anyway, welcome to the future! ;)

Tommy McClain
 
Sony paid for the software and infrastructure.

It's a smart move by them. It'll cut down their time to market (something they're always fashionably late to) and reduce the management headaches of the company actually working together on something.

They should continue to do this until they are able to restructure the organization to be more agile, internally.

Nintendo will do what they think is best for them. Online doesn't seem to resonate with them, no matter what they say in public.

For MS, software and services is what they ultimately are so they can do this internally, if not build on Azure, without much hassle.
 
This opens the doors to all sorta of demos and post launch sales tactics. A demo could literally be the final game build streamed -- even loaded from a certain check point with a limited time to play from that point (e.g. 30 minutes). Post launch you can have various events, e.g. "play the first campaign" or "free MP weekend for everyone" etc to boost sales, especially during slow times of the year. Streaming is probably smaller than a download and access can easily be cut off. And it can be used to leverage digital sales.

Obviously long terms the cloud is where gaming is going and will offer 1 game on every device approach. MS already is developing their own cloud gaming services and Sony just took a short cut to the front of the pack.

This could impact next gen HW: Why go all out on hardware? Get a box that will scale down to $99 ASAP with all the key input devices and outputs needed and then let cloud gaming scale the gaming as an everlasting generation. Oddly I was going to post on this this weekend: This is the last traditional gen of consoles. It is written all over the walls, flour, ceiling, and the fat lady is singing it. In 5 years we may even see where the "Cloud" version is the best version.
 
Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy but I don't like the cloud gaming idea at all.

And as for it being a complete replacement... just don't see it being viable anytime soon.
ISPs are already crying about bandwidth usage. Just wait until 1080p video games are being streamed all over the planet.

And streaming issues aside, are they going to be able to stockpile enough hardware to back this up? Its going to take a damn powerful machine for each gamer. There will for sure be times when you want to play but can't because all the rendering servers are in use.

What if I want to play a 5 year old game and its been deemed no longer worthy of being on the servers?
I wont have hardware powerfull enough at home to render it, so even if I could buy it, it wouldn't do me any good.

Bahh! I will not be happy if this becomes the norm.
 
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Cloud gaming is flatout bad!

You lose any control over the games you paid for, you can lose access at anytime for any number of reasons.
You have a lot of lag, it looks like a youtube video, it cuts out a large amount of the worlds pop ect.!

It will not allow games that look better than what is practical for a mid/low PC at the time (cloud gaming does not mean things stop costing money!)

Wired internet infrastructure does not follow moore's law (unlike what one of the deluded cloud gaming PRs said). it takes ages and huge amounts of money to upgrade it!

It takes on the order of 1.6Gbits to have real time encoded near lossless 1080P at 60FPS!

Not only are phones and tablets not well suited to the controls of console or PC games but wireless internet could not be more unsuited to game streaming! It is shared bandwidth!

If you have the bandwidth for cloud gaming it would not take long at all just to download the game instead!

Reality is different to what the (head in the) cloud crowd thinks.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
There's a whole other thread discussing the importance of BC.

What demo's are you playing?! :oops: Largest demo I've come across is maybe 2 GBs. 7-15 GBs is more likely the entire game.

There's a whole thread discussing that too, but as Sony were never selling PSN content as being forwards compatible any more than they've sold any other content as being forward compatible, there's no reason for consumers to assume their PS3 content should work on PS4, nor reason to think content sold as part of a network service or play-anywhere service like PSMobile wouldn't be trusted. And even then it can't be trusted, because they may remove content from the streaming service one day. Whatever Sony do with this, they can communicate the message effectively.

I also question whether this is any good for BC. What hardware are Sony going to run their PS3 games on to stream? The mother of all emulators on a truly monster PC rig? Old IBM Cell servers going cheap? Or a PS3 for each user? It won't be cost effective. Just let anyone wanting to play PS3 games use their existing PS3 until such a time as PS3 emulation becomes as cheap as PS1 emulation is now and offer people a nostalgia trip.
Click to expand...


See, you're talking about technicalities....
sure..."technically", Sony doesn't have to do anything.
But capturing the hearts and minds of your needed consumers isn't about technicalities.....it's more of a case of the customers always right.

I know this....if Sony doesn't take care of the stuff that I bought, that I trusted them with, then I will never buy anything from them again....and rightfully so.

Sony needs good pub....all the good pub they can get. That's why I'm confident what I bought will work with the PS4 (or whatever it's gonna be called)
 
So who will you buy from if they don't? No one? Perhaps you should start cave shopping for your hermit status.

It'll be interesting to see how far Sony intends to leverage this acquisition (if at all) in terms of the next playstation.
 
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