Sony CEO: Cloud gaming's "technical difficulties are high"

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The CEO of Sony Corporation has said that, while cloud technology holds potential for games, it is difficult and costly to make into a sustainable proposition.

Kenichiro Yoshida discussed cloud gaming in an interview with the Financial Times, where he said the PlayStation firm will continue to look at "various options" for cloud gaming but is said to have played down the risks Sony faces if the industry shifts towards this technology.

"I think cloud itself is an amazing business model, but when it comes to games, the technical difficulties are high," Yoshida said. "So there will be challenges to cloud gaming, but we want to take on those challenges."

The CEO said latency is the biggest challenge that cloud gaming faces, but also pointed to various cost issues.

For example, cloud gaming services face cost inefficiencies in that servers are mostly idle for the day, with traffic spiking during the evening as users get the time to play games.

Yoshida claimed this has been a key issue for Microsoft, as well as Google's defunct cloud gaming service Stadia, but Sony has been putting this time to use by training its artificial intelligence agent GT Sophy to beat human players in Gran Turismo.

Sony was one of the early movers in cloud gaming, having acquired Gaikai in 2012 for $380 million and later purchased the technology of its rival OnLive.

The potential dominance of cloud gaming as a distribution channel has stalled Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard – a deal Yoshida declined to comment on.

We spoke to analysts about whether the technology will disrupt games as it has other forms of entertainment, and discussed this among the team on the latest GamesIndustry.biz Podcast (which will be live soon).