Cloud gaming, that is, games that make use of the cloud in order to stream to other platforms, has been slowly growing in popularity over the past few years. However, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki has said that we won’t have to worry about cloud gaming threatening consoles for several more years.
Cloud gaming does, however, stand the chance of rendering physical consoles obsolete, as you would be able to simply play almost any game on the PC or other avenues that aren’t video game consoles, without restrictions as to what consoles you could actually play them on.
There have been a number of different attempts to capitalize on the promises of cloud gaming over the past few years, such as the OnLive service, but none of them have really gotten any sort of chance of cloud gaming threatening consoles, as they’re too entrenched at the moment. Part of the discussion in the same conference call that Totoki waved off the fears of cloud gaming, for instance, was how Playstation would keep itself from being made obsolete.
Totoki has said that while the cross-platform free to play gaming market was a problem, relationships with third-party developers will help to keep the Playstation relevant well into the future.
The Playstation 4 recently hit almost 95 million units sold across its entire lifetime, ever since the console released back in 2013, and sales go up with each critically-acclaimed game that is released. Plus, with all of the hype building around the Playstation 5, it may be a bit more than five years before consoles start to be threatened.
However it turns out, however, hopefully the chances of cloud games threatening consoles decide to still be low, especially since there are still so many popular consoles and console games coming out, and cloud gaming still has a lot of kinks to work out. But, with that period so far off, we’ll have to see where things go.
