David Perry finally demonstrates his browser-based Gaikai game-streaming service.
For a while, we were wondering what veteran developer Dave Perry meant when he kept saying the future of games is online. After all, the former head of Shiny hadn’t exactly been bathing in success in recent years, especially after the Matrix-based games he had charge of ended up less than impressive.
The missing pieces of the ‘online is our future’ puzzle fell into place when Perry had to hastily announce a new service called Gaikai during this year’s Game Developers Conference. His announcement had been planned for E3, but was pushed forward when the competing OnLive service was unveiled.
Like OnLive, Gaikai is a service designed to run games in a data centre and stream them as video to a web browser. The inherent benefit of this is that the end user just needs a computer capable of running video – i.e., anything made in the last ten years. But more than that, it allows people to play a game without the hassles of installation, patches, or even purchase. Because the actual software runs on a distant server, there is no possibility of piracy, which should make publishers happy.
Gaikai differs from OnLive in a few key areas. Namely, it doesn’t need a plug-in to run, using normal web standards. It also doesn’t rely on specialised data centres and massive internet connections – although, whether this is a good or bad thing won’t really be known until these services are actually deployed to the public.
Having his hand forced by the OnLive announcement meant that Perry ended up announcing Gaikai without any planned PR splurge behind it. Considering the fact that Perry has been known for his Molyneux-esque statements about how ambitious his games are, we had to take anything like this with a grain of salt.
Overnight, we finally got to see what Gaikai involved. Perry has released a ten minute video via his blog, showing a range of games (and even Photoshop) running over Gaikai, connecting to a server 800 miles from Perry. He demonstrates a system that seems to work incredibly well – it appears that games like Need for Speed and Spore ran smoothly and responsively, although the effect of latency on control is something that can’t really be shown via video.
If the end product works like it does in this video, then maybe Gaikai will change the gaming landscape. Probably the most interesting aspect of Gaikai is that even if it isn’t graphically on par with a high-end PC, it should provide a way to at least try a game before spending money on it (or downloading a multi-gigabyte demo with limited content). Definitely a product to keep an eye on.
Supporting our habits:
Anonymous Gibbon
2009.07.05 13:13
This looks amazing! I cant wait to try this! I wonder about playing full screen though.
Anonymous Gibbon
2009.09.10 21:22
There's no way this can work in the real world unless they sell it as sort of a monthly subscription-based service in collaboration with an ISP that will guarantee the required bandwidth and latency to the server. Even so it's probably doomed to fail - we moved away from mainframe computing 20 years ago for good reasons, and since then hardware has become even cheaper.
Anonymous Gibbon
2009.11.18 18:40
It would be interesting to see how this system would cope with lag on first person shooters as they certainly wouldn't be light on the bandwidth… And I suppose they would have to use modified versions of the games for the public release, otherwise they would have problems with people turning up the settings in the games and putting extra load on the servers.
Apart from that however I don't see why this couldn't work.