Sony: Retail still important in wake of Gaikai purchase

While Sony has made a substantial investment in the Gaikai game streaming service – to the tune of $380 million – the company is still committed to retail, Sony UK's Fergal Gara told MCV. Fergal noted that UK retail is undergoing "a bit of a readjustment," referring to the trouble that retailers like GAME have suffered recently.

Still, despite the issues being faced at retail, Sony plans to continue leveraging brick-and-mortar – the company will use retail to demonstrate Wonderbook, for example. He added that he hopes retailers, and not just specialist retailers, will stay committed to stocking games as well, especially considering that the next generation of gaming hardware is right around the corner.

Of course, Sony is intent on creating a new cloud service, so it will be interesting to see how the company's next offering will fit into the retail structure. One example to follow might be that of GameStop, which makes a substantial chunk of change selling redemption tokens for digital goods at its many retail stores.