Gaikai Will 'Look and Play Better Than Consoles'If you missed our first part of the Gaikai interview, please read that here.
IndustryGamers: In talking with EA and Ubisoft and other publishers, their vision is shifting from games as platform-specific to games as a core experience that's expressed differently on each platform. With your technology you can send the console version to the phone or the tablet or the television. Or you could stream the phone version to any device you want.
Robert Stevenson: Absolutely, that's exactly right.
David Perry: We also believe that we can optimize the way games are manufactured and sold today, because they're made physically with manuals and boxes and there's breakage, and loss, and insurance, and all that stuff. If you go purely digital, you could literally double the size of every development team in the country. If you were to say to the average developer, for each game sold I'll give you an extra ten dollars, how much bigger would that team be? It would double the size of their teams. If you could just say to the average executive producer “Would you like to have twice as many resources?”
IG: They'd say “No, no, I don't want more!”
DP: If anything they're constantly getting the squeeze and that affects quality. I think optimization ultimately is a good thing, so we need to find a way to make it as pure as it can be. But be very clear on what Gaikai is and is not doing: We are not participating in any of this; all we are doing is helping it happen. At the end of the day, anyone who thinks we're out there trying to sell these games or anything like that, that's not what we're doing, we are out there just trying to help. I want the developers to make more money, and I want the publishers to sell more games. If you want to compare us to anyone, compare us to Amazon or Verizon. If I need to make a phone call, you really don't want to build Verizon's network to make that call. Whatever business you do on that phone line is really your business. We just make sure there's a dial tone when you pick it up, and that's effectively what Gaikai is; it's the dial tone to make all of this actually work. You don't want to have to talk to LG to get your game on their TV, we'll take care of that problem, but I want to be very clear: When that game's running on that TV, we're not billing and we're not making any money, that's between you and the company that's actually serving.
IG: If your monetization is as frictionless as possible, then it becomes relatively easy for people to try out your games.
RS: You can set and find the right price point very quickly. You don't have to relabel every package that's on a store shelf. Price protection, you take all that out. You can move the price up, move it down, find the sweet spot.
DP: To be very clear, this is not in any way anti-retailer, because retailers have great buyers. The game industry is in this weird situation where if we go digital, it sounds like we need to get rid of the retailers. That's absolutely not the case, because with this technology, somebody can start playing on walmart.com, and they can continue streaming on walmart.com. Walmart paid to find that user, they ran all the commercials on TV, it's their audience with cash in their pockets ready to spend it, and they can do a digital continued game. You can play anywhere that you're accessing walmart.com, for example. They're very valuable; we've found that the highest conversions are from those people. They come with the attitude to spend money.
We are basically empowering all of that. It's their relationship between the publisher and them to go and do that. It actually gives us an opportunity to continue to grow with the retailers instead of seeing them as someone that we're trying to get out of the loop. That's the problem with GameStop and the used game thing. It's creating this “As soon as we can get to a point where everything's digital then retail won't be selling the games;” it's not the case at all. Retail is critical, it's a really important piece of this puzzle, so we have to think of how to embrace them.
RS: As the device footprint gets larger, as you start integrating in televisions, retail becomes even more important. They're the ones selling the device footprint that games can be streamed to. There's always going to be people that will appreciate the packaged good, that will appreciate that sort of physical thing...
IG: The collector's edition.
RS: The collector's edition, the zombie apocalypse is coming so I need to have the bits just in case. You're always going to have that sort of relationship with consumers.
IG: Do you think the nature of the game retail experience will change?
David Perry
DP: We think these are going to become the kiosks of the future. You can imagine Best Buy just became the biggest arcade in the world. What do you want to do, watch a bit of TV or play Street Fighter for a little while? If you had the ability to do that, to know that if you just buy that TV, it's guaranteed to be able to do that because you were just playing on it.
IG: What about the controller issue?
DP: There's two ways to do controllers. The first one is to use regular joypad controllers; at the booth we're showing Logitech controllers working with TVs, and we do have wireless and wired, whichever they want. The second way to do controllers is to use mobile devices. Set-top boxes, for example, are all moving to 'here's your iPad or Android controller.' You have completely configurable controls in them, meaning I'm left-handed, right-handed, whatever...You have a default for each game.
IG: What about bandwidth constraints? What kind of bandwidth does Gaikai need to make this work?
DP: The broadband makers are trying very hard, because you don't want your music to play any faster, your email is pretty good, your movies look OK; yeah, there's a bit of buffering and it takes a while, but it kinda works, so they haven't got these killer apps to get them to say “I have to go that one more tier.” What content is out there that might get somebody to upgrade their broadband? How about 1080p stereoscopic gaming? We can deliver that, but you're going to have to upgrade your broadband. Ultimately I think there's a bit of a forcing function, as more people buy better TVs and want more HD streaming, even Netflix needs more bandwidth when you start going to high definition. I want 1080p with very little artifacts, you gotta start giving me some more bandwidth.
IG: The ping and latency issues have also been a concern for me about streaming.
DP: I had a big problem because I've been on the content side of making games, and the teams are very sensitive sometimes to how the games look and feel. I knew that if we built a service where the games feel really lame that I'm going to lose some of the games. I'm not going to be able to get the really high-end stuff. What we did is we went into this eyes wide open, going “this is going to be a problem.” I could run the whole of Gaikai from one data center, and if I did it would bring our costs down and make our lives easier, but the problem is the ping times would be atrocious.
Ultimately we realized we're going to need a lot of data centers. Despite what everyone says about the speed of light, as it crosses switches and crosses from network to network there are delays. The only way to do this is with a lot of data centers, and we were like, “Oh, this is going to be painful.” OnLive is really the only other company in the world that's built with a global network. We went in two exact opposite directions, they went 3 data centers, we went 24. We went 24 because we were just insanely self-critical of ping, and they were trying to keep their costs down. Ultimately I think this is going to win the hearts and minds of all the best developers in the world. Because we've gone the extra mile, it's extra expensive for us, it's a lot more management work to manage servers at that level, but I actually think we're going to keep going, we're going to have more and more and more data centers as we continue to get closer.
IG: It's a level of quality that opens up more games.
DP: I did a demo for a publisher recently in Los Angeles, for me personally it finally all made sense. I sat in Los Angeles wondering what the ping was going to be from their building, because it needed to be a great experience, and I pinged it out - it was 2.5 milliseconds to our data center. That's what this is really all about. If you're in a metropolitan area with really good peering, and you've got servers in that metropolitan area, you are only a few milliseconds away.
If you think about it, this TV has a way of processing images that's actually quite slow. They have three motherboards in there that communicate with each other, and they haven't thought about how to do it fast, they've thought about how to do it cheaply. Because it doesn't matter if they add on another hundred milliseconds of delay, because you don't notice when you're watching your TV. Imagine that the engineers that make this television are working with Gaikai, which they are, and they give us a direct route from the ethernet port directly on to the screen. As fast as it can possibly be done with no buffering whatsoever, you have buffering completely disabled. Which is the way it has to be. That means I can gain maybe up to 19 milliseconds on the TV, over an Xbox, because the Xbox is going in the old way. There's much more savings in the TV available to us by working with the hardware manufacturer than there is in the network that's powering it.
We have the relationships to get them to make those changes, because they want this. We've basically said to them, “I know this sounds crazy, but this will look better and play better than consoles.” Everyone will go, “No, that's impossible, it'll never work, you're crazy, it's ridiculous,” but if you just think about it logically that's actually what's going to occur.
