Sony Purchasing Gaikai for $380 Million

Sony Computer Entertainment has officially released news of an acquisition: Gaikai, a cloud gaming service that leads its field, has been purchased by Sony for a cool $380 million. According to Fortune and IGN, the streaming service has been searching for a buyer for only a short while, originally asking for $500 million.

 

Gaikai's streaming services provide direct cloud gaming from the publisher of the game to the consumer, with no middle man between. The company's cloud service can stream games online in any browser regardless of the user’s CPU or processing capacity (wow!) by making Gaikai's cloud servers do all the heavy computational lifting.

Gaikai's largest competition as some of you may know comes from OnLive, a service which has been heavily marketed at PAX Prime and PAX East. OnLive currently offers an a la carte service with a microconsole and controller. It also has a larger selection of games to play.

Both Gaikai and OnLive have recently started to compete indirectly -- OnLive is more consumer-based, focused directly on mass licensing to deliver direct to the user, while Gaikai is focused on establishing 3rd party partnerships to maintain strong business relations with companies and publishers who promise a robust library, and many releases to come.

News of Gaikai selling to Sony may come as a surprise, seeing as how the company made a business plan pitch during E3 this year outlining a plan to partner only with other firms. They had also been working with NVIDIA and WikiPad on unspecified projects, so the fate of these is up in the air as well.

But why cloud gaming, why Sony, and what does this have to do with PC gaming? Picture this: PC or console games streaming from the cloud to your system of choice, no more downloading, and even less reason to purchase a physical disc.

PC gaming really benefits from this next step forward toward blurring the edges between PC gaming and console gaming. Purchasing one copy of a game and being able to play it on any system? Not having to worry about whether your computer can actually run the game? Yes please.

Specific details are scarce and will trickle out as the deal finalizes, but Gaikai CEO David Perry has commented that Sony is seeking to "harness the power of the interactive cloud and to continue to grow their ecosystem, to empower developers with new capabilities, to dramatically improve the reach of exciting content and to bring breathtaking new experiences to users worldwide."

Now, the deal hasn’t been finalized, but we can easily see this one closing without a hitch. The possibilities of cloud computing is enough to make one daydream!

For those of us concerned about buffering, increased internet speed capacity and CPU power has reduced if not eliminated buffering issues with other major media outlets like Netflix. If the servers, your ISP and your computer are operating as normal, buffering isn't an issue.

So, if Sony can keep the cloud servers up? By all means, bring on the cloud!