OnLive gets competition in the cloud from Gaikai's Streaming Worlds.
In the week post the Game Developers Conference (GDC), sanity has descended upon journalists who encountered the OnLive streaming gaming service. Attitude seems to have swung from ‘OMFG it works!’ to ‘it’ll never work.’ There have been some pretty interesting pieces published about the service, perhaps the best negatively slanted one was done by Eurogamer, covering a swathe of issues from video compression to the sheer amount of expensive hardware needed on the back end of such a service.
What makes this incredibly intriguing, though, is that Dave Perry is also working on a system that he was set to unveil at E3. His company is called Gaikai which has now prematurely unveiled itself in order to soak up some of the buzz around OnLive. Gakai’s service is dubbed Streaming Worlds and operates in a similar way to OnLive – the game is run in a dedicated server farm, keystrokes are captured and video is sent in return.
Rather than use the Web TV conceptual model familiar to OnLive founder Steve Perlman, Streaming Worlds uses a browser game analogy. It seems a much more plausible one. Expectations are high when buzzwords like high definition are thrown about, while browser gaming and stereo sound packs a more realistic modesty to it. One doesn’t really expect a Web 2.0 wiz-kid to understand the importance of control sensitivity and twitch gaming, but one does expect a veteran games developer to understand the fundamentals (no matter how off the mark his work has been in the past).
Despite an obvious annoyance that his seeding of ideas in preparation for an E3 launch has been ruined, Dave Perry has done a pretty interesting interview with GamesIndustry.biz. He touts his service as better, largely because it doesn’t need any kind of download to get rolling – it is entirely browser-based. He also stresses that this will likely be a service done in conjunction with ISPs rather than an internet free-for-all, reducing latency to a minimum.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is Perry’s claim that OnLive announced its service at GDC in order to head off expected competition at E3. While it is certainly a comment made by someone frustrated at being beaten to the punch, OnLive was pretty much the only ‘bombshell’ announcement of GDC. With the revitalised E3, this year, it is easy to expect that the big announcements will happen there.
With news that Sony has trademarked ‘PS3 Cloud’ (and years of Sony telling us that the PlayStation 3 would connect to other systems through the internet), it certainly looks like this new model of games delivery won’t go away. It looks pretty likely that E3 will bring with it some very interesting glimpses into the future direction of PC gaming.
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