PlayStation 4 is billed to provide a back catalogue of streamed PSone, PS2 and PS3 titles courtesy of Gaikai at some point down in 2014, however, the service’s European launch could face delays due to concerns over the territory’s broadband capability.Speaking with Edge, SCEE president and CEO Jim Ryan explained, “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.
“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.”
Ryan confirmed that these issues are why Sony didn’t discuss Gaikai at its pre-gamescom conference last month. He explained, “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, We’ve got a roadmap, there’s just a few bumps along the road that need to be ironed out.”
Gaikai is a cloud-based streaming service that will provide access to Sony’s back catalogue, as well as powering certain elements of the PS4 hardware from a distance. The service will likely be discussed in greater detail next year.
