On Monday, Sony made the surprise announcement that they had bought Gaikai, the cloud gaming platform, for the small sum of $380 million. But what does it all mean? The truth is, nobody knows, yet that didn’t stop the wet, wild, and wacky speculation that we saw over the past few days.

Forbes Magazine ran a story entitled “Is Gaikai Acquisition Proof that Sony is Dumping PlayStation?” However, if you read the article, it spends a full page discussing the underselling PS Vita, leaving only a paragraph to discuss the acquisition of Gaikai, essentially suggesting the end of consoles. Given the fragile state of our global Internet structure, I would disagree with this view. Nor do I see Sony dumping the very successful PlayStation brand.

Richard Leadbetter at Digital Foundry had a much more realistic take, suggesting it would be a better service to use for things like demos, but then analysed the numbers and the latancy frame rate, specifically the lag rate. While the performance of cloud gaming is improving, their tests show that it still doesn’t even come close to local play.

However, despite Shiny Entertainment and Gaikai founder Dave Perry claiming that the future of gaming is free-to-play, the simple truth is this; the PlayStation 4 has been in development since at least 2010, if other rumours are to be believed.

Now if Sony were planning to make cloud gaming the central piece of the next PlayStation, surely they would have acquired Gaikai or similar early in development? So for now, while the Gaikai announcement is interesting, expect it to supplement whatever Sony has in store for the PS4 rather than be the main feature.

In a decision which is sure to have widespread repercussions in the larger debate on used video games, and certain not to please the big publishers, the European Union Court of Justice has ruled that, essentially, the consumer is allowed to resell any used game, whether a physical copy was purchased or the game was downloaded.

The ruling in the case of developer Oracle vs. software reseller UsedSoft reads:

“The principle of exhaustion of the distribution right applies not only where the copyright holder markets copies of his software on a material medium (CD-ROM or DVD) but also where he distributes them by means of downloads from his website. Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy – tangible or intangible – and at the same time concludes, in return form payment of a fee, a licence agreement granting the customer the right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that rightholder sells the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution right. Such a transaction involves a transfer of the right of ownership of the copy.”

Now, to me, the most interesting phrase there is “unlimited period.” This is what consumers are used to; the oft-cited “first sale doctrine” where you buy a DVD or Blu-ray movie, you can watch it for as long as there is a drive that will read them and electricity to run them. However, in business, people are more used to being granted limited rights for a specific time. A case in point is in your cinema screens now; one of the main reasons The Amazing Spider-Man was made, a reboot of a franchise only five years old, was that if Sony do not use their license, it reverts back to Marvel.

So what happens to used games now? Will Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, and Steam be forced to offer a resell option for their downloadable titles? This is undoubtedly the first in many rulings on the general subject, and this one did not go the way developers would want. The used games debate is about to get very interesting.

[Source: GamesIndustry International]