European broadband issues delaying PS4 Gaikai rollout
by
David Hinkle (3 hours ago)
PlayStation games
streaming is due sometime in 2014 here in North America, but for our friends across the pond, it's a more problematic affair due to the issues surrounding broadband internet availability in Europe. SCEE President and CEO Jim Ryan told
Edge during
Gamescom that Sony "doesn't yet have a timeline" for rolling out PlayStation cloud services to Europe.
"So 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," Ryan said. "And so that will happen in 2014 in North America initially. Now – and I touched upon these issues of broadband in Europe during the 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. So at a show which is now pretty global in its reach but primarily aimed at a European audience, 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."
PlayStation cloud services will be powered by
Gaikai, which Sony
acquired in 2012 for $380 million. Gaikai, which has
been around since late 2008, was founded by iconic game developer
David Perry, the founder of Shiny Entertainment and creator of such beloved games as
Earthworm Jim and
MDK.