Sony: PS3 Games Streaming Via Cloud in 2014 for North America Only, No Timeline for Europe, PS4 Games Later

Giuseppe Nelva June 23, 2013 12:42 AM EST

The ability to stream games via the cloud is going to be an important selling point for PS4, but when can gamers expect to enjoy it? According to Sony Computer Entertainment Europe President Jim Ryan it really depends on where they live and what they want to stream, as he shared during an interview by Gamereactor.

It’s gonna be pretty much a phased approach, and it’s gonna be phased in terms of geography and in terms of how we’ll do it. We’ll launch in North America in 2014. We are working to bring that service to other parts of the world, and most notably Europe, but you know, Europe is… I love Europe… It’s a great place to live and it’s so different… You know, Scandinavia is different to Italy, to France and everything is different to the UK, but that difference makes it great to live there, but it makes it rather difficult to do stuff like introducing a cloud gaming service, because it’s just very fragmented. So there’s a lot of details to work through, and we are in the the process of doing that, but we don’t have a timeline for introduction outside North America. We will start with the streaming of PS3 games to both PS3 and PS4, and that will quickly be followed by PlayStation Vita as a client device.

Ryan also specified that streaming PS4 content is not off the menu, but won’t come immediately.

That’s also on the roadmap, but we’ll start with PS3 and then quickly it’ll migrate to content from other platforms.

Unfortunately European gamers will get the shaft, at least for a while. We can’t really blame Sony for the large variety of details, regulations and caveats imposed by the colorful landscape of European governments and their respective legislation, but it’s still sad to see that things never really seem to go our way.