Yeah, this strikes me as an infrastructure thing. Sony don’t have a cloud computing platform, and building one would be hella difficult, so that means partnering up with someone. The three main options are: AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. As Jon says Azure is very platform agnostic, as is most of Microsoft these days (see .NET Core).
I guess Microsoft are gearing up to provide seamless low latency game streaming, there’s no reason Sony can’t piggyback on the top of that. The consoles themselves share a lot of the same hardware, why not share the same data centres? It is a surprise that they’ve decided to ‘explore’ doing that together though.
Of course, this doesn’t mean we’ll suddenly see PS games on Xbox, or visa-versa, it’ll make zero difference to the people consuming those services. This is all just about the underlying infrastructure that supports things.
It’ll be interesting to get the thoughts of long time Microsoft watcher Thurrott, once he’s finished digesting the news.
