Chief Executive Officer at Sony, Kenichiro Yoshida, speaks about the technological barriers that remain when it comes to cloud gaming. During a Financial Times interview, Yoshida talks about Sony has been looking for ways of progressing through this period of online streaming.
Kenichiro Yoshida stated, “I think cloud itself is an amazing business model, but when it comes to games, the technical difficulties are high. So there will be challenges to cloud gaming, but we want to take on those challenges.”
Yoshida cites the issues with latency as being one the biggest hurdles with cloud-based gaming. Many customer complaints have mentioned how the time it takes for the inputted action on the controller to appear on screen has dampened their gameplay experience to varying degrees. In addition, the oscillating popularity of gaming during the day has influenced Sony as well. The Sony Chief Executive Officer highlights how the many people tended to play games after they got off of work and having a high number of people logging on at one time has causes major performance issues. Adversely, it would be financially inefficient to run the servers during times where there are fewer players online, so there is a conundrum there too.
However, the interview hints at a possible workaround for those issues. When referring to these quiet periods as “the dark time,” Yoshida states, “The dark time for cloud gaming had been an issue for Microsoft as well as Google, but it was meaningful that we were able to use those hours for AI learning.” Kenichiro Yoshida mentions in the Financial Times interview that Sony could potentially incorporate artificial intelligence to assist with cloud gaming. He notes how their artificial intelligence agent, Sophy, has already been using less active gaming hours to train itself how to beat people in Gran Turismo where it has shown some other potential.
In fact, Jim Ryan stated, “We observe mobility in gaming habits to be an increasingly important trend, and the cloud will be fundamental to allowing us, or indeed anybody else, to exploit that trend. We do have some fairly interesting and quite aggressive plans to accelerate our initiatives in the space of the cloud that will unfold over the course of the coming months.”
Though cloud gaming currently only makes up a small percentage of the global games market, it is seen as a potential landmine in the gaming industry. Kenichiro Yoshida talks about how many players still use consoles and computers to play videos and how previous standalone streaming services have failed like Google Stadia and OnLive. However, Sony’s interest in the field has piqued due to observing the heavy investment in cloud gaming by their competitor Microsoft Corporation. Sony has been experimenting with the technology for years with PlayStation Plus being known as one of the earliest pioneers of it. Sony hopes that cloud gaming will push their company in the right direction in the future once they overcome the hurdles that come with it.
Recently, Microsoft’s Game Pass service has been growing in numbers and with the company’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Sony has been hard at work to be one step ahead of them. Since Sony acquired Bungie Incorporated back in 2022, they have been pushing further in the cloud gaming space as they accelerate their efforts to offer more live services for their gaming console.