Sony's Gaikai deal 'defeats the purpose' of cloud gaming, OnLive U.K. boss claims

What exactly do Sony and Gaikai have in the works? At this point, you can guess for yourself, but we’ve heard from Sony that it’s looking at using Gaikai to stream games to its products. But does the $380 million acquisition take anything away from the intentions of cloud gaming? For Bruce Grove, the U.K. boss of OnLive, that’s exactly what the deal between Sony and Gaikai will do.

“I think it kind of defeats the purpose of cloud gaming to limit it to a subset of devices," Grove said in an interview with Edge. "The whole point of putting anything into the cloud is to make it available on everything.”

In an earlier statement, Andrew House, President and Group CEO of SCE, said, "By combining Gaikai's resources including its technological strength and engineering talent with SCE's extensive game platform knowledge and experience, SCE will provide users with unparalleled cloud entertainment experiences. SCE will deliver a world-class cloud-streaming service that allows users to instantly enjoy a broad array of content ranging from immersive core games with rich graphics to casual content anytime, anywhere on a variety of internet-connected devices."

For his part, Grove believes cloud services, like Dropbox, for example, should be available on all platforms; “it doesn’t’ matter whether it’s my Samsung phone or my iPad, PC or Mac. That’s the key to the idea of cloud technology.”

He added, “For us it was very important to show that this was viable technology and create a new platform, not to just take the first step along the road. We can argue the pros and cons over which is the right model but this is what we set out to do - create a platform."

"There’s no reason that as Smart TVs become more ubiquitous that we can't be in all of them," Grove said. "As long as we can put the client on there and as long as it can stream video and take input there’s no reason for OnLive not to be on that device – and that basically turns everything into a console."

For our part, we view cloud services as a way to access your files—including music, movies, game save files, school papers, business documents, etc.—over the internet. How you connect is almost beyond the point, but it’s hard to believe that Sony acquiring Gaikai “defeats the purpose of cloud gaming.” This is simply a business move and could open a ton of doors for Sony. It's to be expected that Gaikai's counterpart, OnLive, would have a strong opinion about this deal.

Then again, that’s just our opinion. What do you think? Does this acquisition defeat the purpose? Do you think we’ll even see games streaming on PlayStation products, including PS3s, PS Vitas? Let us know your opinion in the comments section below.