Orange buys into cloud gaming with G-Cluster investment
Orange is already a big G-Cluster customer, offering a rebadged version of the Japanese firm’s cloud gaming services to its Orange TV customers in France.
Watching the game
Apart from that means for the linear TV service, by making nice with the service providers Microsoft may be able to use those integration deals to ensure that Xbox Live game play and downloads also don’t count against a user’s bandwidth cap.
The gaming business can’t figure out which cloud approach it likes best
Like everything else, gaming’s destiny is in the cloud. But precisely how that will work has yet to be agreed upon.
With PlayStation 4, Sony seeks to balance past and future
The steps Sony has taken to take cost and development time out of the PlayStation 4 are not without a price of their own. And the trade-offs involved speak directly to Sony’s high-stakes effort to balance the game industry’s past and future.
Gaming out next steps for Apple TV
With the current generation game consoles showing their age, and the gaming industry generally poised to make the leap to the cloud, now would be the time for Apple to make an aggressive play to grab a bigger slice of the in-home gaming market to go along with iPad’s growing share of the mobile gaming business.
OnLive assets sold to new company, service will continue
The fate of cloud-gaming pioneer OnLive is in question following a report that most of the staff was laid off and the service was closing. The company has denied those reports but hasn’t provided further details.
Today in Connected Consumer
Sony made news this morning for something other than falling earnings and layoffs. Instead, it announced the acquisition of cloud gaming service Gaikai for $380 million. The move could have significant upside for Sony across multiple divisions, particularly given the price. Last month, Fortune reported Gaikai was looking to sell for around $500 million, so it appears Sony got a bargain. For starters, it could allow Sony to virtualize a lot of the capabilities of its next-generation PlayStation console by shifting some of the functionality to the cloud. Sony has been rumored to be designing an “off-the-shelf” PS4 console, leveraging existing processors and technologies to keep costs down, and the Gaikai deal could be a big step in that direction. The deal will also let Sony do for a decade’s worth of PlayStation games what Spotify and Netflix have done from music and movies, by bringing games to any connected device with a display and a controller. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter chimes in that Gaikai could also be embedded in Sony TVs, helping it promote sales of high-end displays. All in all, well played, Sony.
What Sony’s $380M purchase of Gaikai means for future gaming hardware
Sony Computer Entertainment’s $380 million acquisition of cloud gaming provider Gaikai suggests Sony’s future may not be in any piece of proprietary hardware but in a cloud delivery platform that brings PlayStation games to any connected device.
G-cluster plans mobile gaming service to challenge OnLive
G-cluster plans to enter the U.S. market with an on-demand gaming service. The company has secured an unnamed amount of funding from Intel and French mobile carrier SFR to expand its reach beyond home casual gaming and movie streaming into high-end gaming for tablets and smartphones.
Happy Cloud Taps the Cloud to Speed Up Video Game Downloads
Happy Cloud, a Cambridge, Mass. startup believes the key to accelerating online gaming of top titles is intelligent progressive downloads that leverage the cloud to make games playable within a few minutes. The goal is to make video game downloads as on-demand as videos on Netflix.