The legal battle to decide whether Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard will be approved in the US continues, with that, new information about the backstage continues to emerge on the internet.
This week, we had the participation of Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, who testified about the negative impacts of the merger and how it affects PlayStation’s business and the games industry in general. In a certain part of his statement, the executive spoke a little about the evolution of PlayStation cloud games.
Last year, Sony launched a revamped version of PlayStation Plus, in a strategy to go head-to-head with the growing success of Microsoft’s Game Pass. One of the main novelties of the new PlayStation Plus are the three different subscription levels, each one containing specific benefits and game catalogs for download or streaming.
Unfortunately, many countries do not support streaming games, preventing many classic games from previous generations of PlayStation from being able to access them. To make matters worse, Sony recently began testing streaming PS5 games in countries where the feature is available, leaving markets like Europe even more behind in terms of content.
As it turns out, the evolution of PlayStation’s cloud gaming is moving at a slow pace and Sony doesn’t want to rush things. In his deposition, Jim Ryan reveals that the company doesn’t expect cloud gaming to represent a large part of its business model until 2025 at the earliest.
It obviously depends on how you define meaningful, but I will say that cloud technology will become a significant component of how gamers access games between 2025 and 2035.
After some questioning, Ryan said it was impossible to be more specific, but added, “We’re making significant investments in the cloud in the expectation that it will become a very significant way in which players access game content.”
Despite rumors that Sony is beefing up its Europeian servers to include the streaming feature in the country, we haven’t had any news about that so far.
In addition, Sony also recently announced a portable device that allows mirroring the PS5 over Wi-Fi, but with the expansion of its cloud services, the device could become even more complete and useful, being a sure bet by the company.
As always, we can only wait to find out what the natural evolution of PlayStation in the cloud will be, but it is obvious that there is a demand for the growth of this service, even more so in a country like Europe.
