Gaikai previously targeted 10 million monthly users with the launch of its affiliate program back in June, and the company has already reached that benchmark. Next step? 100 million monthly users. Gaikai CEO Dave Perry told GI.biz that the next milestone is about increasing visibility for the company.
"We are targeting 100 million as quickly as we can possibly get there," Perry said. "We need to get above the reach of any single game entity in the industry a quickly as we can.”
Perry explained that Gaikai’s tech can dramatically increase the visibility of game titles for publishers.
“The ability to pull a lever and have a million people play your game is something that's crazy to even think about today. That's a very difficult problem, yet with cloud gaming that will be really quite straight forward. A normal way of thinking will be, 'I want another million and another million'. It turns out that the number one way to get people to buy is trying your product, and it's amazing that game trials are being made so difficult," he added.
Perry also went into the reason that Gaikai has only offered demo content instead of full titles like OnLive, a rival cloud gaming service.
"We are a company doing this for other people. If this was just Gaikai and Gaikai has down time that's our problem. But if I'm doing it for Electronic Arts or someone else and it's down, then it's my problem big-time and everyone's going to be calling. If you just paid to play a game and you log in and it's not available for any reason you're going to get mad,” he said.
"We're at a point now where the conversions that we're seeing on the partner sites are way higher than expected so now we want to go to full games. The problem with that is I need to offer Amazon-level 'always up' service time."
Can Gaikai’s business model work? Are streamed demos really the wave of the future?
