Sony prepares ‘aggressive’ cloud gaming push in coming months

SONY Group is gearing up for a push into cloud gaming in the coming months as it works to expand its reach beyond consoles.

Cloud computing will be fundamental to tapping into mobile gaming trends, Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan said at an investor relations event on Wednesday (May 24). The company is building on its acquisition of Bungie last year, which it touted as an accelerant for its efforts to offer more live services on PlayStation consoles and beyond.

Sony has “some fairly interesting and quite aggressive plans to accelerate our initiatives in the space of the cloud”, Ryan said, without elaborating further.

A year earlier, Sony articulated a strategy for carving out a bigger share of mobile and PC gaming with the help of live services. Among those, cloud-based gaming, which involves streaming from data centres to devices such as smartphones, tablets and smart TVs, remains a tiny segment of the video games market. The lion’s share is controlled by gaming consoles made by Sony and rival Microsoft. Another scenario involves streaming a game from a PlayStation in the user’s home to their mobile device, which may be the thing that Sony is focusing on.

Some executives at the big console companies have long argued that cloud games could eventually cannibalise the console market by increasing access to top-tier games on less sophisticated and mobile hardware. Standalone cloud gaming services have so far failed to go mainstream, with notable failures like OnLive and Alphabet’s Stadia, but Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service is popular and growing. BLOOMBERG