Sony Group Corp. is gearing up for a push into cloud gaming in the coming months as it works to expand its reach beyond consoles.
Cloud computing will be fundamental to tapping into mobile gaming trends, Sony Interactive Entertainment President Jim Ryan said at an investor relations event Wednesday. The company is building on its acquisition of Bungie Inc. last year, which it touted as an accelerant for its efforts to offer more live services on PlayStation consoles and beyond.
Sony has “some fairly interesting and quite aggressive plans to accelerate our initiatives in the space of the cloud,” Ryan said, without elaborating further.
A year earlier, Sony articulated a strategy for carving out a bigger share of mobile and PC gaming with the help of live services. Among those, cloud-based gaming, which involves streaming from data centers to devices such as smartphones, tablets and smart TVs, remains a tiny segment of the video games market. The lion’s share is controlled by gaming consoles made by Sony and rival Microsoft Corp. Another scenario involves streaming a game from a PlayStation in the user’s home to their mobile device, which may be the thing that Sony is focusing on.
Read more: Sony Plans to Buy More Game Studios, Grow With Live Services, PC
Some executives at the big console companies have long argued that cloud games could eventually cannibalize the console market by increasing access to top-tier games on less sophisticated and mobile hardware. Standalone cloud gaming services have so far failed to go mainstream, with notable failures like OnLive and Alphabet Inc.’s Stadia, but Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service is popular and growing.
