On Friday afternoon, The Verge broke the news that the largest cellphone carrier in the U.S., Verizon, was “quietly testing” their own game streaming service, currently known as Verizon Gaming.

“Verizon is currently conducting alpha testing of Verizon Gaming, a game streaming service that would represent a major new initiative for the home and mobile internet giant. The Verge can report that Verizon Gaming is already up and running on the Nvidia Shield set-top box and will, according to the company’s documentation, eventually make its way to Android smartphones. In either usage scenario, the service can be played using a paired Xbox One controller. Verizon has not publicly advertised Verizon Gaming or even really acknowledged its existence.”

The article goes on to state that players recruited into the test are being offered $150 Amazon gift cards as compensation for their participation, as well as a free Nvidia Shield and Xbox One controller.

While the news that Verizon Gaming exists, and is being tested is a bombshell report in and of itself, there may be more to this story than meets the eye.

As The Verge points out, screenshots provided to them of the various games available on the fledgling Verizon Gaming service show something extremely odd and interesting among the titles available for the service: a number of PlayStation 4 exclusives.

Titles like Knack II, Detroit: Become Human, and 2018 game of the year, God of War are all shown as part of the selection screen of Verizon Gaming.

The Verge pointed out these anomalies and mused that they are “likely just placeholders“: citing a source from Verizon stating that the trial was”primarily focused on performance“, with a game selection consisting of “most or all of the top games you are familiar with” appearing at a later time after the kinks are worked out of their system.

While that explanation might be spot on, one has to admit that it is extremely odd for a company as huge as Verizon to use such well known console exclusives from an unrelated competitor as part of their marketing. One has to believe that Verizon would run the risk of any number of heavy legal ramifications should Sony get wind that images of some of their biggest games were being used as fuel to set up a rival streaming service.

Then again, perhaps they’re not rivals.

This is where I go into speculation mode: What if Sony and Verizon have entered into an as-of-yet unannounced partnership?

While the idea sounds implausible at first glance, the idea of Sony and Verizon joining forces isn’t as far-fetched as you might think.

First of all, you have to remember that like it or not, the future of the gaming industry is two things:
One – Streaming
Two -Service based.

As we at NerdBacon have reported on extensively, the gaming industry is about to go through the largest period of upheaval since the introduction of the CD-ROM in the early nineties, thanks to the impending arrival of the three technological titans of our age: Google, Apple, and Amazon.

The overall speed of internet connections, along with emerging techniques of delivering games to players, and the convenience of bundling a number of different content features into one subscription package, means that a: streaming videogames without an expensive PC or console is now viable, and b: this new-found viability is extremely attractive to companies that are competing in this new service-based ecosystem market.

All three of these titans, as well as others like Disney, will be expanding their services within the next 1 – 2 years, and games are seen as a way to get a leg-up on the competition.

The combined technological/financial muscle of just one of these titans entering the gaming industry would be enough to cause any exec at the current “big 3” to lose more than a few hours of sleep a night. The prospect of all three of them arriving within a year’s time-span is akin to a full-blown alien invasion.

All three current console manufacturers are going to have to drastically figure out ways of combating not only each other, but the onslaught of multiple trillion dollar behemoths entering their playground.

This means innovation and partnerships.

Microsoft has been extremely proactive in the fortification of their defenses, thanks to their radical initiative to transform the concept of the Xbox away from a simple box sitting under a TV screen, to the idea of Xbox as a service.  This bold new direction encompasses ideas such as the ability to play any game on release day through Game Pass – to a major investment in streaming technology through their upcoming Project xCloud: a service that will allow subscribers to stream Xbox content to any device, including cellphones, tablets, or PC’s.

Sony has been the most silent of the three current console champions when it comes to their next generation plans. We know for sure that PlayStation 5 is coming, but we don’t know what direction the company will take.

While they already have had their own game streaming service in PlayStation Now for the past several years, Sony has no way of delivering this to users outside of the PlayStation ecosystem, This places them at a huge disadvantage as the industry moves towards the final generation of consoles, and towards a more open-ended/streaming/service-based future.

We already know that Sony is working towards the ability to deliver content to devices beyond PlayStation, and pairing with a company like Verizon – the largest cellphone carrier in the U.S., would provide Sony with a huge advantage over their rivals.

Think about how attractive the prospect of getting X amount of years to a revised PlayStation Now service, complete with the ability to stream to any cellphone device, would be as an added incentive to current and future Verizon and PlayStation Network consumers.
Sony could also roll PlayStation Now into PlayStation Plus membership, pair that up with Verizon, and allow users to stream their PlayStation libraries anywhere.

Add in the impending arrival of uber-fast 5G networks, of which Verizon is at the forefront, and suddenly you have the ingredients for a very attractive partnership.

It’s already been reported that Sony has been researching the possibilities of 5G technology.

In May of 2018, T3 noted a potentially revealing tidbit from Sony’s FY 2017 financial results.

“By enabling high-speed communication, low-latency and simultaneous connectivity, 5G, which is expected to be commercialized in the near future, is a technology which we view as having immense potential, since it can connect all portable devices to the cloud. In order to fully utilize this leading-edge technology, we need to retain in-house our fundamental research capability and capability to create related applications. By continuing to work on 5G in our smartphone business, we are aiming to develop 5G technology as a competency that can be used across the Sony Group.”

While that quote was offered by Sony as a way of explaining why they are still in the cellphone business, T3 pontificated on a key line: “we are aiming to develop 5G technology as a competency that can be used across the Sony Group.”

T3 expanded on this by speculating that Sony could be working on a new portable gaming system – a possibility that I don’t believe is out of the realm of possibility, as Sony is keenly aware that Nintendo’s wonder-hybrid, the Nintendo Switch, has nearly overtaken the PlayStation 4’s lifetime sales in Japan. While that’s one small microcosm of the gaming market, it at least proves that there is a strong appetite for the ability to take your gaming experience anywhere.

If  Sony actually is working on a new handheld, then a partnership with Verizon still makes sense in that Sony would be able to take advantage of Verizon’s already existing 5G network to deliver streaming content to the new portable device, while simultaneously allowing those less inclined to purchase a dedicated handheld a way to still enjoy PlayStation gaming from their Verizon cellphones.

Sony already set a precedent of partnering with a cellphone carrier when they partnered with AT&T to allow 3G online play during the launch of PlayStation Vita. So again, the idea of a quid-pro-quo is not without merit: Sony gets to use 5G technology to stream games to a new handheld, and Sony games get to appear on Verizon cellphones as part of Verizon Gaming, and thus, provides Sony with a measure of insulation against the onslaught of Microsoft and the titans.

Then again, It’s entirely possible that I’m reading too much into a simple screenshot, and that the appearance of those Sony games was nothing more than an innocent mistake which has kept Sony’s lawyers in their offices all weekend writing lovely cease and desist letters to Verizon.

In any event, the arrival of Verizon Gaming into the gaming market marks yet another important twist in the unfolding saga of the gaming industry in 2019.

The slogan with which I have crowned 2019 once again bears repeating:
“You will not recognize the gaming landscape by the end of 2019.”