With Sony’s expected reveal of the PlayStation 4 still a full 24 hours away, the video game industry gumshoe Superannuation has dug up several new domain registrations that seem to indicate that the company may introduce some kind of PlayStation Cloud product at the event.
The new domains in question (Playstation-Cloud.com, Playstation-Cloud.org, and Ps-Cloud.net) were all registered on February 15, 2013 and have Sony’s Gaikai streaming service listed as the administrative, technical, and registrant contact.
Interestingly, this is far from the first time that we have seen Sony stick their heads into the PlayStation Cloud. Way back in March 2009 Sony filed a trademark for “PS Cloud“, and then followed it up with the domain registration PlayStationCloud. Nothing was ever done with the trademark, however, Sony Computer Entertainment America is still listed as that domain’s registrant.
This new set of PlayStation Cloud domains — not to mention the 2009 trademark — seemingly support a recent Wall Street Journal report that claimed that Sony was planning to use Gaikai’s cloud gaming technology in the PlayStation 4 as a way to stream PS3 software to the new system. According to the unconfirmed WSJ article, this solution was needed because the next generation PlayStation is not going to be backwards compatible with PlayStation 3 games.
Apart from being a not-so-great backwards compatibility solution, it also seems reasonable to speculate that Sony might use the PlayStation Cloud technology as a method to deliver PS4 game demos (possibly even to PlayStation 3 owners) or as a way to stream smaller-sized PlayStation Network games.
Sony is expected to announce the PlayStation 4 tomorrow evening, so it will presumably not be long before we find out exactly what the PlayStation Cloud is and how the company intends to use it. While we wait for that official confirmation, let us know your thoughts and expectations for the Gaikai streaming tech and how it might interact with the PS4.