Sony Pays Big for Gaikai

Sony has announced that they have entered into an agreement with Gaikai to purchase them for a whopping $380 million. Gaikai has been around since 2008 and has built out one of the highest quality, fastest interactive cloud-streaming platforms in the world. With this move, Sony’s presence in the online content space will give PSN users what will purportedly be an unparalleled cloud entertainment experience. But has Sony started its online cloud service too late? Or was this a smart move purchasing an established service to catapult their service forward?

Andrew House, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc stated, “SCE will deliver a world-class cloud-streaming service that allows users to instantly enjoy a broad array of content ranging from immersive core games with rich graphics to casual content anytime, anywhere on a variety of internet-connected devices.” Mr. House’s comments are nice but with very few specifics about their future plans with Gaikai service being incorporated into PSN or Sony in general, many are left speculating as to the impact this acquisition actually will have in Sony’s plans moving forward.

In the press release out of Tokyo, David Perry, the CEO of Gaikai Inc said “SCE has built an incredible brand with PlayStation and has earned the respect of countless millions of gamers worldwide. We’re honored to be able to help SCE empower developers with new capabilities, to dramatically improve the reach of exciting content and to bring breathtaking new experience to users worldwide.” SCE will establish a cloud service and expand its network business by taking full advantage of Gaikai’s revolutionary technology and infrastructure. Which means, Sony is probably going to take their data centers servicing dozens of countries and key partners around the world. This is going to give Sony the ability to establish a cloud service and expand its network business by taking full advantage of Gaikai services.

With this purchase by Sony it could help bring new gamers over to the PlayStation network. Some are even speculating that this will be the competitive advantage that Sony needed as leverage for the next generation PlayStation. But is Sony going to charge for this service or are they going to have users pay for it separately, or will it be some baked in feature? Will they include it in there PSN Plus network services? At this point nobody seems to be sure what they are going to do with Gaikai, but only time will tell us about this new partnership. Hopefully it isn’t too late for Sony to get into the cloud race against Nintendo and Microsoft. We will keep you up to date with this story has it happens.

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