OXMUK
More news from OtherBox Land this morning this morning, where water continues to be poured on the conjectured industry-crushing implications of Sony's purchase of game-streaming service Gaikai.
Eurogamer's published a lengthy, interesting report which includes comments from Andy Payne, Mastertronic headman and UKIE chairman, and Screen Digest senior analyst Piers Harding-Rolls. Both reinforce Michael Pachter's suggestion yesterday that Microsoft doesn't need to "respond" to Sony's move e.g. by acquiring rival streaming service OnLive. Or rather, they argue that Sony may, in fact, be responding to moves already made by Microsoft.
"Microsoft has already got its ball," said Payne, discussing cloud gaming at large. "They've bashed that ball around quite a fair bit, don't worry about that. They've already got their strategy well in place.
"If anything, Sony has been playing catch up. It's just that Microsoft hasn't told everybody necessarily what they're doing with their streaming service.
"Very simply, Microsoft is a technology company. This is about technology. They will have their balls nicely in a row, without any shadow of a doubt, on their offering through Xbox. They know that. It will only be a matter of time, won't it? It's an arms race.
"They will have a streaming component to Xbox ASAP. One would know that it will definitely be, I'm sure, announced very soon. One has to hope that Nintendo have got something up their sleeve."
"They're pretty strongly positioned," added Harding-Rolls. "They have the expertise, they have a huge resource of software technology staff to actually build these types of solutions." But even if they felt they needed outside systems, there are a number of number of streaming solutions out there."
"Microsoft is building its own, massive cloud infrastructure to provide services to its clients, so already it's building its capability in terms of managing other types of content.
"I don't think it would want to acquire something like OnLive that has gone out and tried to build its own network, and try and assimilate that into its existing cloud infrastructure. It would be more a case of it building out its own infrastructure rather than acquiring someone like OnLive."
We're keeping pace with the discussion. Your thoughts? Would you buy into an Xbox game streaming service, or do discs, boxes and dedicated living room hardware have a lasting charm?
http://www.oxm.co.uk/43372/sony-is-playing-catch-up-to-microsoft-with-gaikai-acquisition-ukie-chairman/
