Sony Gears Up for New PlayStation Cloud Gaming

Sony appears to be extending its efforts for PlayStation cloud gaming amid rumors of a new handheld gaming console. The company revealed 22 job listings to work for its cloud gaming tech with a specific aim at PlayStation.

Cloud Gaming Efforts

Sony is currently recruiting employees for 22 vacancies in cloud gaming tech. Based on a report from 9To5Google, this might be an effort for the company to extend its push to release a new PlayStation cloud gaming, given that it is on its way to becoming the next big thing for the industry.

The job offerings include a Director of Product Management for Cloud Gaming, three software engineers, five senior platform engineers, two technical project managers, one technical writer, four reliability engineers (with manager), a DevOps engineer, a junior network engineer, a security architect, a senior business intelligence analyst, and a network capacity planner.

"Are you a ground-breaking innovator in the cloud streaming product space? Then you likely agree that Cloud Gaming is on its way to becoming a major part of the gaming industry," Sony noted through the job posting.

Once they are hired, employees will become a member of Sony Interactive Entertainment's Future Technology Group (FTG). From there, PlayStation Lifestyle reported that they will have the opportunity to lead entering the cloud gaming industry for Sony. Sony FTG also contributed to some of Sony's R&D, like VR, controllers, and several software elements.

Previous Listings

Sony previously listed a Director of Hardware Engineering that will be tasked with providing vision, research, and development for SIE's custom servers, rack designs, and high-speed fabrics. Aside from this, they previously looked for a pricing hardware architect that will the company work for the future of PlayStation's data center infrastructure for cloud gaming.

Sony & Microsoft Cloud Gaming

The Verge reported that these job listings mean that Sony is working on a new hybrid cloud infrastructure, with both Kubernetes and Amazon's AWS, and not with Microsoft Azure. Previously, Microsoft and Sony announced a partnership for developing new cloud-based gaming services in 2019.

Microsoft stated in its announcement, "The two companies will explore joint development of future cloud solutions in Microsoft Azure to support their respective game and content-streaming services." Some of its existing game and content-streaming services were supposed to power by Azure.

Both of the companies did not publicly announce this change. But in 2021, PlayStation Chief Executive Officer Jim Ryan stated that they had yet to get past the "exchanging ideas" stage, which revealed that it did not work out. Adding to this is the relationship between the two companies after the public fight over the Activision Blizzard deal.