Recent Acquisitions by SONY in Gaming and Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality

When you think of major acquisitions made in the tech space, SONY does not come to mind. The last one that you can think of that made headline news for this firm was the acquisition of Ericson in 2012. Ever since then SONY has been acquiring new technology firms from time to time to bolster its capabilities in the gaming space and video processing areas.

One of the premium assets picked up by brand SONY was Gaikai, a cloud based gaming software company in 2012 for $380 million. There was also another acquisition made in late 2012 of Pixim which was a semiconductor firm specializing in high-end chips for video cameras.

Interestingly, from 2013 to 2015, things have been pretty quiet in the acquisition arena for SONY, in spite of the low interest rates. There were not even any significant Joint Ventures announced.

At The 2014 Game Developers Conference, Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida introduced Project Morpheus and on March 18, 2014 stated Project Morpheus was “the next innovation from PlayStation that will [shape] the future of games.”

On September 15, 2015, it was announced that Project Morpheus has been named PlayStation VR.

Come 2015, the hunt for new complementing technologies is on full steam. In 2015 alone, SONY has picked up four new companies. These are “The Orchard”, “OnLive”, “Optical Archive” and more recently “Softkinetic”. Two of these acquisitions call for a closer examination. OnLive is a cloud gaming company offering a cloud gaming platform and a cloud desktop system that develops server-based video game processing. Its games run on high-end gaming PCs in its data centers and are streamed via the cloud to its users’ Mac, PC, or Android device. The latest acquisition of Softkinetic this month provides SONY with more capabilities in complementing gaming and virtual reality. Softkinetic is a provider of natural interfaces that transform the way people interact with the digital world. Softkinetic enables a fully immersive, transparent, and intuitive user experience by providing 3D real-time gesture recognition middleware to interactive digital entertainment, consumer electronics, and serious games companies. Interestingly, when SONY’s VR gear was reviewed at GDI, it showed promises but also there were challenges. According to Ben Gilbert in an article published in the TIME by Matt Peckham last year, “It’s not all virtual reality rainbows and dreams, of course. There are still some pretty major issues to overcome in Project Morpheus. Vision blur, for instance, is a much bigger problem on Morpheus than on Crystal Cove/Rift DK2. The screen resolution is also clearly not as high as DK2, making everything a bit muddier, visually speaking. Right now, well ahead of launch … Project Morpheus is both extremely promising and clearly not ready for prime time. But it’s close! “

With all the recent acquisitions, including SoftKinetic, one can only hope that these issues will be resolved when SONY introduces its VR platform. I would anticipate more acquisitions by SONY to bolster up its product offerings in this space. Until then, keep an eye out for more headlines for Project Morpheus.

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