TheSixthAxis has picked up on some curious filings made by Sony in the days following OnLive’s unveiling at the Game Developers Conference. The name PS Cloud has been trademarked by Sony, hinting that they could be attempting to rival OnLive with a service available to PlayStation owners.

Are they really thinking this through though, or are they just trying to follow the crowd? See what I think over the jump…

OnLive, as I moaned last week, is the online streaming service that let’s you play any game you like (as long as the publisher is signed up) on any old PC or Mac, or through your telly if you buy their controller and TV adaptor. You load up the software, sign in (paying a subscription for the privilege) and then play what you like, the game action being fed through the interwebs as a video feed.

The issues are immediately apparent; with internet speeds being somewhere around the level of “not even nearly as fast as you need them to be” the inevitability of lag, connection issues and general hogging of bandwidth cannot be countered. But that’s for another time. The fact is that Sony are trying something similar…or at least desperately clamouring for publicity.

According to TSA (and since I can’t be bothered raking through pages and pages of legal crap) the trademark application “a central hub for communicating with computers and consoles, pushing out publication of video games, movies and music to our PlayStation consoles present and future”.

Even more curiously, the document goes on to talk about an “on-line video game that users may access through the internet”. So this service would be one-part remote access to the PlayStation Store – possibly to start up downloads on your PS3 from work or something similar – and the second part would be an OnLive style service letting you play games remotely.

All very curious but will anything come of this. Personally, I can’t see anything happening. As I see it, Sony are merely jumping on the bandwagon that OnLive started. However, with the inevitable cost that will result from procuring high-speed servers to keep the service alive would without a doubt have a severe impact on the price of consoles, say, or even on the cost of joining the PlayStation Network.

Considering the PS3 is a hi-def home entertainment console, what would be the point in providing remote access outside of beginning downloads on the PS Store, something already possible through Remote Play on a PSP?

Am I over-speculating? Or are Sony really not thinking things through?

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