Sony CEO Kaz Hirai believes video games moving into the cloud space will be spearheaded by Gaikai, which is a firm the PS3 platform holder acquired for $380 million. In speaking with BusinessWeek, Hirai explained how cloud will play a major role in gaming during the next five years:
People are moving more and more to the mobile space, so the two keywords, and you’ll probably hear this from everybody: smartphones and tablets. Related to that is moving a lot of things to the cloud. That’s why, for example, we felt that it was very important that we acquire the 50 per cent of our joint venture in Sony Ericsson and make the cell phone business or the smartphone business a 100 per cent-owned subsidiary of Sony. We needed to make decisions a lot faster. In regards to the cloud, one of the things that you probably saw is our acquisition of a company called Gaikai. That is a company that’s going to propel the movement of the video game business into the cloud space very quickly.
Previously, Gaikai planned to come to iOS devices, but it’s not known if Sony will change that and bring the service only to their platforms to help sell hardware.
[Via]
