Bloomberg: Sony's Deal With Microsoft Blindsided Its Own PlayStation Team
- Thread starter vivftp
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When I tried psnow, it was good for killzone:sf, but rdr ran and looked like ass.
This article from Bloomberg is ridiculous. I will say it's lovely gossip; that is about it. Now, if anyone would be feeling the heat, it would be MS's Xbox division. In regards to Sony, it makes sense to diversify and not rely on a single provider (Amazon.)
It's just a fancy way of saying "They weren't told this happened."
But considering this is gaming related and Sony and MS are rivals in that space. Yeah they were probably upset.
What? You can do very similar things in AWS and in Azure, depending on what you actually did of course. There are tools like https://www.terraform.io/ where it doesn't even really matter which cloud provider you use.
hahaha. Is that why Microsoft is spending billions of dollars on Xbox 1st party development, Xcloud, Studio acquisitions, new hardware development? Xbox division is growing with a greater budget. What you said doesn't make any sense.
I mean purely from a slanted point of view what's good for the goose is good for the gander. What's better for MS stock value? Xbox division succeeding or Sony division succeeding at Xbox division expense. Satia got up recently and noted how gaming was one of 3 key pillars to MS future. Do I think Xbox will get preferential treatment over any other azure client? No of course not. But do I see Sony putting playstation blades in azure servers like they are with Xbox one s for Xcloud? No of course not. Sony I'm sure will get very competent servers to use but they aren't gonna get to go in and tinker with servers hands on at data centers like MS already have with blades for xcloud. When you own your product you can taylor it to your liking vs your a client paying for a very specific service of said product.
Also make no mistake I think this is a rare win win for both companies!
The way MS sees it, is that if they sell there cloud services to Sony, Amazon or maybe Google will.
Sony will have to get some specialisation because the servers have to run PlayStation games via emulation or PlayStation hardware.
It was a joke. People say now that psnow sucks and later they can blame it on ms
Dan Dan Dan Dan daaaaaaa... :D
What is the alternative here? Complete transparency all the way through the chain?
I'm not saying you can't do similar things. Obviously you can or else this move wouldn't be happening to begin with. However, it is not a stretch to think that customized cloud solutions that were being done with a very specific product/service in mind (the would need to account for/communicate with specialized hardware) could possibly be developed in a manner where changing cloud services would result in/require a significant amount of rework that needs to be done which would be headache/panic inducing on the lower level employees who had no idea of an incoming change.
I honestly don't believe a word from that article. It looks more like console warrior click bait to me.
I guess they expect all employees to be made aware of ever single business transaction before it happens, so they can help negotiate and bring their insightful business knowledge to shareholders. /s
I work for a tech giant and the business moves that our company makes without our knowledge is plentiful and will continue to be.
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But why would you "panic"? If you were the guy who built a specific aws service you will now be the guy who will be responsible to make the move over to Azure. I mean, I do this stuff also at work and yes, migrations from vendor a stack to vendor b stack can often be challenges but engineers are used to these things nowadays.
The main problem is always transparent communication but I don't know a single company that does this right.
Our company made a $5 billion acquisition a couple of years ago - we found out when everyone else did.
Given how huge Microsoft has become...I'm a bit surprised they haven't decided to go big and just buy Sony.
My understanding is that MS will be supplying xCloud, which is more than just some Azure resource. It overlaps with a lot of the stuff that is being done with the Gaikai team.
People might laugh at this but MS currently is THE wealthiest company in the entire world. They 100% could if they wanted to.
What the fuck? No it wouldn't. They will absolutely get preferential treatment. Sony will get what has been agreed paid for.
They're a trillion dollar company. Sony is 66 billion in comparison.
Sony has hardware component expertise that would benefit Microsoft, and they also have a huge Playstation division that would bolster their gaming segment and give it some entertainment clout for years to come.
I don't think it's that crazy in today's world
Not an apples to apples comparison. An acquisition of Sony's size (66B) is much smaller compared to Disney (243B)...and Microsoft is bigger than Apple.
Microsoft has enough cash on hand to buy over two companies the size of Sony straight up.
I'm not saying it would be smart just that they have the dolla dolla bills!
I don't think Microsoft are interested in Sony's hardware division.
OP
OP
I've always heard such an acquisition attempt would be blocked by the Japanese government if a non-Japanese company tried to buy a company like Sony. Funny enough that exact topic was covered in that silly FoxyGamerUK vid I watched today and they basically said the same thing.
Forget about the market cap, do you know how big sony corp is? the price would be massive to purchase them.
Yes...?
You dont go buying $60bi market cap japanese conglomerates just because you have money LMAO
Some of you are so delusional
That quote basically spells out what the deal is.
Sony is currently using AWS for PSN. They use a custom solution for PSNow. The custom solution can't be scaled up to handle what they wanna do with the future of streaming, so they knew they needed a big server network. That means Google, MS, or AWS.
They hit up AWS first. They didn't like those terms. They hit up MS next, it sounds like. And the terms were good.
What possible input would anyone below the highest PS execs have in that process? "Hey, rando engineer, you got any advice about which of these three things (and there are only those three options) we should use?" The answer is always going to basically amount to "whichever is the best bang for our buck." Just let the Sony brass do the talking there and figure out which of the three flavors of server you end up using.
It's not really unheard of....sometimes these companies become so flush with cash that they decide to buy other companies rather than invest internally, raise the dividend, or issue stock buybacks.. That's basically the core of Berkshire's business.
Microsoft has nearly 140B cash on hand. They would likely need only a fraction of that to buy Sony depending on the terms of the acquisition.
As someone mentioned though, the Japanese government is the biggest obstacle and it's highly doubtful they'd ever approve the transaction of such a treasured company representative of their country's success.
I work in the data services and hosting industry and these decisions are almost always top-down.
Monopolies investigations are also likely to be an insurmountable hurdle.
Some of you are going to get a really big shock when you go to work.
I'm a mid-level Business Analyst, in the job for 3 months, and I'm working on 2 projects I'm not allowed to talk about with my other team members about, let alone anyone else in the company.
This wouldn't have just been top tier execs. Even for an MoU there will have been a team working on this at various levels & fields of expertise some of whom may even have worked on parts of it as a discrete task & not been given any other info about it.
For example, the Commercials piece won't have been the sole province of the CFO to work on, some else further down the chain in Finance will have done legwork there.
This article makes it sound like there been some kind of mass panic in Sony, where in reality it could've been a post-announcement discussion with a few members of staff who had simply asked for clarification on what it meant for there immediate position.
Kudos to c0de & Antrax for bringing some sense to this conversation
I'm a mid-level Business Analyst, in the job for 3 months, and I'm working on 2 projects I'm not allowed to talk about with my other team members about, let alone anyone else in the company.
This wouldn't have just been top tier execs. Even for an MoU there will have been a team working on this at various levels & fields of expertise some of whom may even have worked on parts of it as a discrete task & not been given any other info about it.
For example, the Commercials piece won't have been the sole province of the CFO to work on, some else further down the chain in Finance will have done legwork there.
This article makes it sound like there been some kind of mass panic in Sony, where in reality it could've been a post-announcement discussion with a few members of staff who had simply asked for clarification on what it meant for there immediate position.
Kudos to c0de & Antrax for bringing some sense to this conversation
Yeah. They implicate these decisions in some personnel changes - Ryan replacing Kodera as CEO - which suggests at an executive level they knew what was going on, even if Sony Corp/Yoshida was handling negotiations.
The article also suggests the worry among other staff was about how this deal might affect next gen console plans - which obviously could worry staff working on that when they got wind of these negotiations. It's funny looking back, but when Yoshida indicated in his first interview as CEO last year that a next gen console would be 'necessary' despite cloud steaming etc, he might have been directing that reassurance as much internally as to the public.
Anyway, it's interesting - and of course it makes sense - that Sony was also talking to Amazon since last year, but couldn't come to commercial terms. By the way, contrary to some other posts here, PSNow is not currently running on AWS. It runs off a private cloud hosted by non-public cloud infra providers.
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Saw the article before it jumped on ERA, but thought that gaming peeps will interpret this differently. From what I see, this is a non-gaming business deal and shouldn't really affect Playstation or Xbox Divisions. These companies are bigger than console warring and MS offers alot of services than just Xbox. Glad to see Azure now in Sony's court too. Seems Amazon and Google will be fighting for your cloud dollars soon.
Quite ridiculous. These corporations are legally bound to make profits for their investors. If they don't do that, they aren't doing their jobs. Sony and it's PlayStation Division aren't a charity.
