Dave Perry, industry veteran and founder of the Gaikai service, has announced that the cloud-based gaming intiative has entered open beta today, with 11,000 invitations being sent out over the past 48 hours.
“Anyway, on Sunday afternoon we decided to stop coming up with excuses not to launch Gaikai to the public and silently sent out a blast of 1,000 invites around the world. Suddenly we were officially 'Open Beta', people were playing within minutes and leaving nice messages in our survey system,” Perry wrote in a blog post.
“We sent out another 10,000 invites and players are currently hitting 15 of our 24 data centers. No issues have been reported that we can't fix this month, and so we will continue to send out invite blasts in waves of 10,000 until all issues are fixed,” he continued. “The game everyone is playing first is Mass Effect 2, it's the highest rated PC game in the last 12 months and BioWare simply rocks.”
Additional invitations will be sent out as the Gaikai team fix issues and scale up the infrastructure. Players can register for the open beta on Gaikai’s official website.
Perry said that the team has at least 60 deals in the pipeline for Gaikai, with various publishers, retailers, media sites, etc. Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, already have a client working with the service.
“The Second Life team has also been working away on a special build that they wanted to stream with no friction. They sent out a tweet and people started hitting the servers, it worked well. They posted to Facebook and now are inviting directly with emails (I just got one.) So that traffic is keeping our servers busy too,” he wrote.
Gaikai has a very different focus than competing cloud-based service OnLive, but are the two going to come to a head eventually?
