I’m not sure I understand how Sony is in a different position. Microsoft having Azure isn’t comparable to Sony’s situation.
Unless I’m mistaken, they’d probably be using GCP, Azure or AWS infra, the same as Nintendo would. Feel free to correct me if this isn’t the case,
Sony's infrastructure is hand built - it had to be, it started before AWS did - though I believe they have used various partner providers for their data centers, but that's not what I was referring to.
Sony has invested huge amounts of money into PSN in order to build PSN into a media streaming platform. Sony is one of the Big Five movie studios and the only one without a dedicated streaming service but not for lack of trying. They started Video Unlimited in 2006 and their music streaming platform Music Unlimited not long after - Sony is
also the largest music publisher and the second largest record label in the world - which eventually became Sony Entertainment Network which became the Play Station Network.
They also did the reverse, trying to launch a stream service off the back of the Playstation Network, using the media delivery platform they'd already built to launch Playstation Vue, Crackle, and I don't know how many streaming services in India. Sony wanted to do for streaming media with the playstation the same thing they had done for DVDs and BluRay's - own the platform that people use to play the media that Sony also owns, and PSN was the way to do it.
They've never managed to make it work both because it's a brutal environment, and because Sony understands streaming worse than Nintendo understands Online Gaming, but it means that PSN and the store with it have received more investment in it's infrastructure than makes financial sense for Playstation alone
but Nintendo gets no pass whatsoever from me. They’re just choosing not to focus on this space in the same way.
Yeah, absolutely. As a consumer, you should absolutely not care about the situation on the ground, just the product, and you are absolutely correct that Nintendo has generally failed to appreciate the importance online. But we're in the technology thread
. Speculating about the tech and market forces is part of what we do, and Sony and Microsoft have a set of financial incentives and technical advantages that Nintendo simply does not have in the online space.