Gaikai: The Future Is Free-To-PlayIndustryGamers sat down with Gaikai at CES for a private chat with co-founder & CEO David Perry and Senior Vice President of Interactive Entertainment Robert Stevenson. They spoke about Gaikai's mission, and technology, and some of the ramifications of their plan. It's nothing less than trying to remake the entire game industry, and some of the implications are interesting.
David Perry: Have you seen the Gaikai demo running in the LG booth? I think it's impressive that LG got the demo working for the show, they really had to step it up to get that working in time for the show. In a weird way it's put them suddenly at the very bleeding edge, because they were the one company able to demonstrate cloud gaming to a TV with no console required.
IndustryGamers: The console just vanishes.
DP: There's no cost whatsoever. The point being, if you're looking at two TVs on a wall, and this one plays all of the latest games, there's no new chips needed...
IG: Why wouldn't I get that one?
DP: Why wouldn't you? And if you go, Huh, I think I'll go with the one with the games, that's a thousand dollars for them. They just made a sale, this guy just lost his sale because he didn't have the games. We even witnessed it at the booth, because they have two TVs side by side and one of them had throw-the-frisbee games, the very basic casual games, and the other one we had Street Fighter and everything else running on it and you just had to look at the crowds around it to say “I think in the store they're probably going to choose this one.”
"We are fundamentally pushing the whole game industry to go free-to-play." -- David Perry
The people who make these TVs don't participate in the game industry in any way at all. They keep hearing about the billions of dollars that are made in this industry by the console makers but they just don't participate. Steve Jobs, I think, has done a pretty incredible job of teaching the world that you should monetize the use of the devices. I'm listening to music here and somehow he made money off that, and I'm playing this game, and somehow he made money off that as well. That's the genius, monetizing the use.
IG: Jobs always seemed ambivalent about games. He never really wanted to have games on his platforms.
Robert Stevenson: Totally, I think it caught him off guard to a degree.
DP: What happens is when these guys start a platform, they start thinking they're going to need a weather application, they're going to need a stock ticker, sports ticker, calculator, and they think that that's all you're going to need. That's what happened to Apple, they went that route just like everybody else, and then they actually figure out that games are the most dominant thing, the top ten apps, most of them are games. Facebook, the same thing, no interest in games to start, they just create this capability and assume you're going to do all this other stuff.
RS: Android and Windows Mobile, same thing, games are always right at the top.
DP: So they're all finally starting to realize that when they put this as a platform they're going to need to start to take care of games. Then the question is how are we going to do that? Should we start building consoles into the TVs? Should we put a video card in there?
IG: Which gets expensive, and hot.
DP: Then there's storage, and I've got the same problems I have today on my PC, which is “Yeah, that looks pretty good”, it's a 40 minute download, and they're never going to put really high-end hardware in the TV, they can't afford to. They don't really have a choice.
We've got this elephant in the room that's never going to go away: The download. If data moves from one place to another, the consumer always pays the price of that. Games keep getting more and more rich, Star Wars being the shining example, they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger. If they keep getting bigger, and we've got this download problem, there's no secret trick that suddenly means that download is going to be super fast. There's nothing coming, otherwise we would use that technology. So there's nothing coming and the only way to do it is not to do the download. If you don't do the download then we're back to super convenient, and that puts the consumer first.
Otherwise I've got my PlayStation, I've paid you $500, I want to play this game demo, and it's an 800 megabyte download.
IG: OK, go away, have some food, come back later.
DP: I'll go away and have dinner and play that demo I'd like to play. Now this game doesn't even have a demo, and that's really inconvenient.
If we can place the gamer first, every game must be free-to-play, so we are fundamentally pushing the whole game industry to go free-to-play. They haven't quite caught that yet, but that's actually what's occurred.
IG: That's catching up to them, it's what's happening online, in mobile and in social games.
DP: They have no choice; it is the future. Effectively, all the games that don't have demos right now Gaikai is able to make free-to-play. We have this slogan: “Play it; if you like, share it with all your friends and tell them this is really cool. If you love it, then pay for it.” Share it if you like it, pay for it if you love it.
IG: If I'm a publisher, then I have to tell you that I want so much of the game to be free and after this point, you need to pay for it?
RS: Exactly right. You designate your demo period.
DP: You know, that's pretty cool for the gamer, too, because the publisher is going to work out what it takes for you to get a really good taste. They're not going to say “Here's three minutes” and you say “Dude, I couldn't even get through the logos in three minutes!” They're gonna work out what it takes for you to get a good understanding of whether you like it or not.
IG: There was a time when there wasn't much info out there, and you'd buy the game and if it was bad you were stuck. Now there's so much information out there that you can't get away with doing a lousy game any more, because everyone will find out before they buy it.
RS: Those days are gone.
DP: You're absolutely right, the information is spread too fast now. They say that a movie's sales are determined at midnight on opening night, because it's tweeted immediately. You just didn't have that communications paradigm before so we couldn't all know.
We've been focusing aggressively on this whole convenience thing. We count every click, we have all kinds of initiatives and things that we've got in process that are an enormous amount of work and the net result is that it saves a click somewhere, but that matters. That fundamentally improves people's businesses, if we can get those out. I fly places to meetings to get a click out of something, I'm not kidding you, it's ridiculous, but it's really the future for this stuff. That's one of the reasons why Facebook has been so successful. One of the big things that we're focusing on is trying to get games onto Facebook as well, and put real games on Facebook, so we've been putting a lot of energy towards that.
IG: Because you can embed your technology right in a Facebook page.
RS: You can share the experiences seamlessly like you do in Facebook. Look, on my Gaming wall, this is what's going on, I've seen my friend playing this streamed game over here.
DP: The business statement on our site is pretty clear, which is the game industry will never, ever be number one if we keep working the way we work today. We're so high-friction compared to listening to music, which I can listen to everywhere, or I can watch a movie very, very easily in a lot of different ways across TVs and computers and Netflix and everything else. Getting at this content is incredibly easy, with games it's actually still kind of hard. Now Facebook has helped a lot, you see Zynga suddenly worth 6 billion dollars, but for those big games, the stuff that we're very proud of as an industry, to be able to make such high-quality stuff, to get those games in front of a lot of people, we just can't technically do it. That's why I believe gaming will always be in this back seat. We're doing our best here, but we just can't get these massive numbers of people that a movie can reach. What if we could change that? What if games were just as convenient, meaning that you could flip through them like television channels. “Oh, that looks really good, what is it?” and then you're in. here's no “I gotta go and wait 40 minutes” or any of this stuff.
IG: Too many barriers to sale.
DP: It's all going to go away. If we can get to a point where the best that the industry can make, we can get that in front of an awful lot more people, it will be an accelerant. We need ubiquity across all devices, followed by making it really really convenient to get it going, just to see it and touch it and taste it.
RS: We've got the ubiquity somewhat today, and this is one of the biggest frustrations in the publishing business. I might be able to get a version of The Sims on my iPhone, I might be able to get a version on Facebook, I might get a version for the PC and maybe for the console, but they're all different. Different development teams, millions of dollars spent porting versions all over the place, and delays, because frequently versions aren't synchronized, frequently they don't talk to one another, and the cloud solution solves that. You build once and you distribute many, the same way as a movie, right? You write your music once and you distribute it everywhere.
DP: Can you imagine if they made Avatar the movie and it's released on iPhone only. We need to do an Android version, so we reshoot it, we're going to have it ready in four months, then we're trying to decide Symbian, or shall we do it for Blackberry to see who we can get to next? It seems crazy!
RS: But that's what we do.
DP: Angry Birds is actually much smaller than it could have been if this paradigm existed when it launched. Imagine Angry Birds, we realize is the perfect combination of simple game play with comedy, it's funny, it's cool, it's entertaining, it's easy to get into, and then it was everywhere. They pull the lever, and across all operating systems and all devices Angry Birds is available, they would have been even more successful. I know they seem to be incredibly successful, but they would have had even more reach than they have currently. They have to do so much work to get that next little piece of audience. That will fundamentally change.
