Jim Ryan Predicts Cloud Gaming Won't be Meaningful Until Between 2025 and 2035 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 July 2023 / 4,489 Views
Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan during his pre-recorded deposition video as part of the FTC in the US vs. Microsoft hearing predicted cloud gaming won't be a meaningful way for people to play games until between 2025 and 2035.
"Cloud technology will become a meaningful component of how gamers access games between 2025 and 2035," said Ryan. "We’re making significant investments in cloud in anticipation of it becoming a very meaningful way of how gamers access games."
Ryan added PlayStation Now reached a peak of three million subscribers before Sony combined PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now into a single service with three separate tiers.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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so right around the corner or 12 years away?
This reads like a headline from The Onion.
The biggest problem of cloud gaming is not something MS can do something about. If the internet speeds are too limited (both due to providers and people's setups) to allow meaningful performance outside of a couple of titles, most people are not going to care.
And I'd argue the latency can be even more significant than the transfer speeds.
No way for 2025, not much can happen between now and then to change the current status quo.
2035, sure, Maybe but it will still take a massive investment in infrastructure and content for this.
For the cloud to ever be successful it would need to offer content only possible on the cloud, Stadia tried to artificially create this by locking contents to the cloud which could still have worked perfectly fine on any hardware solutions and as a result, failed miserably.
When companies will start creating content with such ambition it could not be executed on conventional hardware then yeah, the cloud will be a thing.
But for this, you will need many shifts in technology and some that are not even in MS/Sony hands. They will need server solutions that aren't simply an extension of consumer product proposals like current consumer GPU/server GPU or else content would still be viable and doable on said consumer products. Server Hardware would also need to be cheap as it would serve no purpose to offer solutions that cost more in customer acquisition than current solutions.
Until this Cloud will always only be an option, one that offers disadvantageous properties vs playing on hardware with no exclusive content (unless artificially locked) that's used mainly with exception use case.
The headline does not properly convey the substance of what he's saying. He's saying that cloud gaming is becoming a big deal, and that it will remain a big deal for the foreseeable future.
Good luck CMA.
He's right about that much. The push for cloud gaming came too soon, before the internet infrastructure of much of the world was ready for it. All of the main Cloud competitors started the Cloud war too early. Google was so early they ended up killing their own service due to a lack of software support, Amazon Luna doesn't seem to be doing much better (mainly used by people to play the free Amazon Prime monthly games), while Xbox says that most people who use Xbox Cloud Gaming only do so to stream a game while that game is downloading to their console. These companies wasted hundreds of millions building up a infrastructure for a market that won't see big growth for another 5-10 years most likely.
