Sony’s buyout of Gaikai has made it a lot easier for the cloud gaming company to make deals with publishers, creator David Perry has said.
Perry told Eurogamer:
It’s going to make the publishers very happy, because the publishers like PC, but they love console. The message I kept getting back was, PC is cool, but I wish you could do this with console. That’s the real meat in our business. That would be really good.
Of course, we had to go, look at this new PC stuff we have. We had to keep avoiding the console question. It’s a very difficult question. If you look at the P&Ls of the publishers, that’s such an important piece of their business. We were like, don’t look over there. Focus on the PC. But the console question never went away. I had a major publisher recently say to me: ‘David, just to be clear, the iPhone is interesting to us. Not as interesting as console. PC? Not as interesting as console. Just to be clear.’
Now that Gaikai will presumably be able to bring games to the PS3 and PS4, publishers can happily support the platform knowing that it reaches their core audience of console gamers.
The other advantage Sony brings is money – publishers were concerned that Gaikai couldn’t support their titles with their small budget:
The second thing they said was, if we’re going to put our biggest games on your service, I’ve got to know you’re going to have the financial muscle to support it. When you’re a start-up, it’s harder to answer that question. But when you’ve got Sony behind you, it’s very easy to answer that question. There are multiple things that have been solved in a single deal. It’s quite surprising.
Continuing:
We were doing it the way you do it if you’re a VC. I have to start thinking differently now because I have one of the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world in our corner. So you have to think differently.
It’s going to open a lot of doors that just weren’t open before.
It’ll be exciting to see what will ultimately come out of the $380 million acquisition, and whether cloud will ultimately replace the console.
