Sony says slow broadband speeds have kept it from nailing down a timeline for a Gaikai rollout in Europe.
Sony picked up Gaikai last summer for a hefty $380 million, with an eye toward using it as the basis for its own proprietary cloud gaming service. It hasn’t had much to say about it since, however, beyond that it intends to roll the service out in North America sometime next year. In Europe, however, things are somewhat muddier.
“The plan is to begin with North America next year and the plan is to provide a streaming service that will allow for PS3 content initially to be streamed to firstly PS4 then PS Vita and then PS3,” Sony Computer Entertainment Europe President and CEO Jim Ryan told Edge. “Now, and I touched upon these issues of broadband in Europe during the [Gamescom] presentation – Europe is of course on the roadmap for that service to be deployed at some point in the future, but for reasons outside of our control we don’t yet have a timeline for it.”
Sony didn’t talk about Gaikai at Gamescom, Ryan explained, because the audience is primarily European, and “we didn’t really want to start talking about the virtues of this great cloud-based service without knowing exactly when it’ll come to Europe.”
“We’ve got a roadmap, there’s just a few bumps along the road that need to be ironed out,” he added.
The Akamai “State of the Internet” report for the first quarter of 2013 listed the top ten countries with the highest “average measured connection speed” as South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Netherlands, Latvia, Czech Republic, Sweden, the U.S. and Denmark, with average speeds running from 8.2 to to 14.2 Mbps. The global average is 3.1 Mbps.
Source: Edge
