Weeks after PlayStation boss Jim Ryan announced an “aggressive” push into cloud gaming, Sony Group CEO Kenichiro Yoshida has acknowledged that the model comes with a lot of “technical difficulties.” Speaking to Financial Times, Yoshida said that Sony’s looking into “various options” for streaming games.
Sony prepared to take on cloud gaming challenges
Yoshida’s statement to FT spurred numerous headlines because he apparently downplayed the threat to console gaming from the cloud business at a time when the U.K. blocked Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard over perceived threats to the nascent cloud market. Sony, a vocal critic of the merger, is thought to have handed Microsoft a win.
However, Yoshida made it clear that Sony is prepared to tackle the challenges posed by cloud gaming, and called it an “amazing” business model. Yoshida’s concerns aren’t unfounded as he brought up an oft-cited complaint with streaming: latency and response times. “There will be challenges to cloud gaming, but we want to take on those challenges,” he added.
Yoshida also expressed concerns about the cost efficiency of cloud gaming, stating that servers remain idle for much of the day before being hammered by high levels of traffic during the evening. But he revealed that Sony has been utilizing the quieter times for AI learning via GT Sophy.
