Cloud gaming

Gaikai is a cloud gaming company that Sony acquired for $380m in 2012. They’re like Netflix, except instead of streaming movies, their service streams games. Streaming games has immense technical challenges, because you need to take input from a player, send it over the internet, compute the output of the player’s input, render it , and send it back over the internet to a player’s device all with minimal lag and a decent image quality. Pulling this off requires a huge engineering effort, as well as a widespread server infrastructure.

“….gaming is fast approaching its own Netflix or iPod moment — the point where convenience and accessibility to content becomes more important than the inevitable hit to fidelity demanded by the underlying technology..” — Digital Foundry

In a demonstration before being acquired, Gaikai Founder David Perry described a scenario where you have just bought a game and and tweet a link for your friends to join. Your friends click the link, the game is streamed to their web browser, and they immediately join you playing that game. Perry created a system where you never needed to wait to try a game, you never needed to upgrade your hardware, and you could play on any device you wanted. Game creators could also make games without worrying if the hardware was powerful enough, because constantly upgraded server racks would provide the horsepower. This is not speculation; this is what Gaikai could do with games streamed to computers, TVs, and tablets. Post-acquisition, I’m hoping Gaikai delivers on his vision (or others will).

Gaikai technology is already being used to enable remote-play, where you can stream games from your PS4 to a PSVita handheld from the same local network or over the internet. Starting some time next year, Gaikai will power the streaming of select PS3 titles to your PS4. Over time, the service could evolve into streaming any PlayStation game to any device. Certain jobs listings on their website describe the company’s mission as “putting console-quality video games on any device, from TVs to consoles to mobile devices and beyond” so I am optimistic this will happen.

Virtual Reality headsets

For those not familiar with the Oculus Rift, it’s a virtual reality headset that launched a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign last year.The headset allows you to look in any direction, as if you were in the game world. It has generated enormous excitement from game developers and gamers alike, because it seems that fully immersive gaming at a low price is finally arriving. Previous attempts in immersion are crazy to say the least (check out this guy).

Sony is clearly aware of the technology, as shown by the above tweet from the president of their game studios.

Patents filed by the company reveal a headset that’s expected to operate much like the Oculus Rift. The company is rumored release the headset sometime late 2014. They are supposedly testing the headset internally with a racing game, which seems to be a good fit for an immersive experience. The company already has prior experience buidling head mounted displays with their HMZ line.

3DTV (and by extension 3D gaming) never really lived up to its promise. Outside a few movies like Avatar and Gravity, there’s a big lack of content that is worth seeing in 3D. There are no PS4 games announced that support 3D, and Sony has seemed to drop 3D in favor of 4K ultra HD televisions. These rumors and patent filings seem to point to a huge push for VR gaming, and if the reactions to the Oculus Rift are anything to go by, it should be really awesome. This high fidelity experience can’t be streamed, and it’ll be interesting to see what the pricing will be for experiences like this.

Microconsole

Sony just released a “microconsole” called the PlayStation Vita TV in Japan $99. A microconsole is exactly what it sounds like, a tiny game console. The PSVita TV, like an Apple TV, can stream TV shows and movies from a variety of services, except it also plays games. These consoles seek to capture the market of “casual” gamers, who play games on their mobile and tablet devices as opposed to huge “AAA” titles like Call of Duty. It also provides an alternative to game consoles like Playstation 4 and Xbox One, which are not only more expensive for a consumer to purchase, but are also much more costly to develop games for.

Microconsoles have had a bumpy road. Though Ouya had an even more successful Kickstarter than the Oculus Rift, they’ve had issues with production, hardware quality, and most importantly convincing game developers to create games for the system. Sony’s approach was to take the hardware already found in the PSVita handheld gaming system, and put it into a small box that can connect to your TV. This gives it access to the game library that already exists for the PSVita. If you have a PS4 in your home, you can stream games locally to your PSVita TV using Gaikai’s technology. If you think about Gaikai’s potential, it’s not unreasonable to assume that in the future PlayStation game libraries can be streamed to the PSVita TV even if you don’t own a PS4.