David Perry recently demonstrated his Gaikai service to a number of publishers at E3, and now he's showing off the demo (in video form) publicly. Despite the buzz since GDC around OnLive, Perry claims he's "not in competition with any other streaming company or technology, our business model is entirely different." He adds, "We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn't take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don't need them, and so our costs will be much less." He'll be talking much more about Gaikai at the upcoming Develop conference and then GDC Europe.
In this video demo (which you can watch below), Perry describes that he's not had to install anything. Gaikai is running directly in Firefox with Windows Vista and Flash. He notes that the data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) for this particular demo (because of where the server is) and his bandwidth is "mostly sub 1 megabit across all games," which he says "works with Wifi, works on netbooks with no 3D card etc."
Gaikai Technology Demo (JULY 1, 2009) from David Perry on Vimeo.
IndustryGamers is pretty excited about the future of games and cloud-based computing. We'll be closely watching Gaikai, OnLive and any other players who enter the space. For those interested, Perry says he's looking for closed beta testers, especially those of you who live in California. Check out gaikai.com for more information.
6 Comments
July 1, 2009
This is crazy stuff. I changed my mind on earlier comments I made. If there was a reason for Sony (or Microsoft and Nintendo for that matter) to get out of hardware, this is it. I wonder how the Graphics card companies feel about all this.
July 1, 2009
Yeah I'm really looking forward to this technology. Keep in mind though that whenever we see these demos, the servers are not being taxed. It may look smooth now, but what about when this stuff has a million people? I'm optimistic but I remain cautious until I see it running under very heavy conditions.
July 1, 2009
I think they'll eventually be able to handle server stress. I just wonder if going the total non-physical product route appeals to me. I like walking into a store and coming out with a physical disk that I can keep forever, not having to rely on some server/subscription model. Still, this stuff is pretty exciting and can't wait to see what they do with it.
July 1, 2009
Even if Cloud based gaming fails when it's released, the whole concept of cloud based gaming will live on, to be developed and improved in the future if it fails. Overall I'm optimistic about it, just a shame that Europe won't see it soon.
July 1, 2009
So, what happens when you 'buy' a game on one of these services, and then 2 years later the hardware or software is upgraded and it's no longer supported? Do you still have access to the game or not?
I like my xbox at home, where the latency between stuff happening and my eyes is
July 1, 2009
There will likely be different business models. What you're buying I believe is not the game itself, but access to the games on the service. In the case of OnLive they will supposedly upgrade the hardware for the servers every 6 months or something, but you're not suddenly going to lose access to your games.