when I said "money" I was talking about a long-term investment already made by amazon, microsoft and google.
Azure as aws or google datacenter are already there ... they need just to put some rack (and i think until scarlet like the story of "4 xbox in a rack" will change with something more standardized)
Third party datacenters - which Microsoft also has used to grow Azure - are also 'already there' and available to any company that wants to lease space. Sony's datacenter footprint is a function of how many leases they want to sign.
Of course having footprints already there is convenient, but datacenter capacity is not an unsolveable problem.
Azure earns by already offering services. thing that does not do psnow.
If Microsoft is using custom xbox hardware for their streaming service, there isn't as much potential cost sharing advantage as may have been previously assumed.
In the meantime Sony can, in leasing at data center providers, cost share on that infrastructure with other companies. Including MS, by the by, who leases as well as builds.
for this reason psnow is practically an already old service before the real fight for streaming became reality. To maintain and invest datacenters all over the world it takes a huge amount of money ... money
My questions were - how much money do you think it will take to lease sufficient data center capacity to meet the needs of streaming users in the next 5 years? Does it match the requirement of a total public cloud service?
I'm asking you also to put that cost up against the cost of running a 'traditional' console business, and the physical distribution logistics therein.
I'm not really seeing any answers or suggestions.
I'm going to put out a bet that I doubt in the next 5 years, the cost scale of meeting streaming demand will exceed the cost scales of supplying the traditional console market today. That being the case, if the latter market is manageable for Sony, I think the former would be also, from a cost and revenue scale point of view. Just for perspective, PS revenue last year was a match for total Azure revenue last year. I'm not very convinced that the 'scale-of-business' leap from the business Sony is in right now to what is likely going to be required to supply the streaming market any time soon is going to be
that big. Now, if we think the game streaming market is going to explode to - say - 100m users in one year, then anyone operating here is going to have scaling challenges, not just Sony! I think more realistically it'll be a much gentler boil than that.
