My take on Sony-Gaikai Deal!

Sony just made a ridiculously weird movement yesterday: It purchased Gaikai, an online gaming service company. So the idea the folks at Gaikai had is it is possible to stream (only) what you see on your screen. Basically it's like having a supercomputer but miles away from the monitor. I still haven't tried it yet, since my internet connection is slower than a snail carrying a box of metal! I supposed it does work pretty well for some (but definitely not for others).



Now I wouldn't go technical on this but I'm sure if you are familiar with the internet, you'll notice that stability is not something that our current network has. We have a decent speed for the internet, it's just we don't have a stable one. While streaming a game, you don't need a fast internet connection, but you will definitely need a stable one. Can you imagine being shot in the face because you have a few seconds lag? It must be pretty annoying.

But lets assume that it actually works. Let assume that most of the gamers have a stable internet connection. I still think that Sony's move ridiculous, not because it's a bad deal, but because, well, it's Sony. Its the company which has been struggling for years to protect the Blu-Ray media. It's the company that has been saying that streaming won't be able to take over the physical media. I know that the online will takeover someday, but not this soon. Blu-ray hasn't even had a solid footprint on our entertainment media. So it is hard for me to accept that Sony is truly changing lane about the entertainment media. If streaming a game is in the near future, then we'll be able to stream everything by then.

That said, I have no gripe on cloud gaming. Technically, cloud gaming can be a perfect solution for the CPU redundancy we currently have. Imagine if we have a dedicated processor specially designed for Graphic, AI, Physics, and network. It would be much easier (and faster) to handle rendering a game. Financially, this would be huge advantage for consumers. Retailers will probably become obsolete and the price of game would be decreased, significantly!

Although it's hard for me to accept that Sony makes the first move among the big 3, I still wish that streaming a game could probably change our gaming lifestyle. But I still think (and wish) it won't happen in a year or two. Our current internet system (technically and financially) is unable to handle the idea of streaming a constant 6 MB of data at 30 times per second. That said, I believe our brightest engineers is currently working on it.