Earlier today, the site VG24/7 (Video Games 24/7, for those that hate acronyms) had apparently heard from an inside source that Sony will be announcing a partnership with a cloud gaming platform, specifically either OnLive or Gaikai. This partnership would come with the addition of being able to stream games from “The Cloud” on Playstation devices. The announcement is rumoured to be made during Sony’s E3 press conference, which is to be held Monday, June 4th at 6:00pm PST.
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I think that advertising bit is inevitable. Games are becoming increasingly commoditised, and as a byproduct of that selling games has become a very low margin business. There's more value in offering ads, so that's where the publishers and developers are going to go.
I don't mind the idea really – ads don't really annoy me on TV, so I'm assuming they won't annoy me when playing games.
My problem is how often the ads will be shown and at what price will the games cost. I would happily pay $30 or less for a big-budget game that also streams ads to compensate for the reduced price, but forcing me to watch commercials for a $60 digital copy of a game just seems intrusive and would completely break any immersive experience that I could potentially gain from the game.
I think it's far too early to start predicting what Sony will do with ads – if they even do.
Sony's got a good track record with ads. There's nowhere near the same level of advertising on PSN as XBLA, and Sony's Music Unlimited service, unlike Spotify, isn't ad supported.
Don't forget that filing a patent doesn't necessarily mean anything will be done with it.