Is your head in the clouds?

With this year’s acquisition of Gaikai, it’s been rumored that Sony might take cloud gaming to the PS3, and it might be more than just a rumor. Andy Robinson over at CVG mentions how the revamp of gaikai.com features images from Sony-exclusive PS3 franchises and quotes the firm as saying it’s “working even harder to ensure the world’s best entertainment content is delivered to you.”

So what will this mean for gamers?

First and foremost it means having access to a huge gaming library with the push of a button. While cloud gaming isn’t a new concept, Sony could potentially revolutionise the way games work on consoles if they introduce it for the PS3. Imagine having every single PlayStation game in front of you to instantly access and play. It gives you chills, doesn’t it? No more mourning of the back compatibility that was the first fatty PS3, no more waiting for your favorite PS1 game to appear in the PS Store so you could revisit those old fuzzy feelings without blowing dust off your old console.

It also means that you quite frankly won’t ever have to buy games again. And this is a huge one. Maybe the brand new games won’t be in the cloud immediately, but with some patience you could save quite a few bucks. And you wouldn’t feel as bad about not finishing a game, you could always just catch up later from a save in the cloud.

But there is one huge elephant in the room. Latency. Unless you have a speedy Internet connection, you will have latency. And even then you might run into some problems if enough people are playing on the servers. For cloud gaming to succeed, Sony would have to really do their homework as far as servers go.

This also brings us to that second elephant that was hiding behind the curtains, and this one has lopsided ears and doesn’t look quite right. The elephant is okay though, but many might not like him that much. His name is Always Online. With cloud based gaming you are forced to stay online, and if your awesome Internet connection goes down you won’t be able to play any games. With an unstable Internet connection this might even be a complete deal breaker, but with a stable one there shouldn’t be any noticeable issues.

All in all it would be like Spotify or Netflix for games, and in my eyes that’s a healthy amount of awesome.

What do you think about cloud based gaming?