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Streaming games with Gaikai
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A challenger appears.
One of the emerging trends in the video game industry is the new resurgence of gaming on-demand services. The concept of streaming games is not a new one as Sega and Nintendo have tried to make an impact in one form or another. The companies failed to reach a wide installed base, and it seemed as though streaming console games would never work.
Spring forward about 14 years to the Game Developer Conference 2009. Steve Perlman, OnLive's CEO who is best known for starting WebTV, has just announced OnLive, a service that will allow anyone to play the latest games on-demand on any television or computer. This is possible through cloud computing and video compression.
David Perry, founder of Shiny Entertainment, has been working on a project very similar to OnLive called Gaikai. The service is a browser-based portal that works similarly to flash-game sites like NewGrounds.com and Kongregate.com. Perry had originally planned to announce Gaikai at E3 in June, but changed it to GDC when OnLive was revealed.
Gaikai is essentially the same as OnLive, but it's on a different platform and can literally be used by anyone with a computer and a browser. To Perry, it's like comparing apples to oranges.
From Kotaku:
"OnLive is going after the living room audience," Perry said. "They plan to fight with Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo all at the same time. They also have to buy every player through marketing, and if they do well, they just steal some market share from Nintendo/Sony or Microsoft. There's no big paradigm change."
The idea of cloud gaming will free the current games from being limited to a select audience of people with high-end gaming PCs. Anyone with a computer will be able to run World of Warcraft, Spore and even Photoshop at maximum quality and performance.
The iPhone has revolutionized the way people access applications with a "tap, wait and play" architecture that has lured many mobile gamers and big-name publishers and developers. Perry believes that Gaikai will one-up iTunes, "We are just one click and Spore or Photoshop pops up. Publishers like this idea. So our positioning allows us to help Nintendo / Sony / Microsoft reach out and draw in new audiences, where OnLive will never get 1st Party titles."
This idea of quickly getting to the games that people want to play is what will set Gaikai apart from any other game streaming service. Players will not need to install, register or update the games. Everything is done server-side so that players can access games faster than ever.
Perry posted a video yesterday demonstrating how Gaikai works. The video features quick demos of Spore, Need for Speed: Pro Street, World of WarCraft and EVE Online. The video demonstrates to the public how the games will run within a browser.
From Perry's personal blog:
(1) No installing anything. (I'm running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)
(2) This is a low-spec server, it's a very custom configuration, fully virtualized. Why? To keep the costs to an absolute minimum. We had 7 Call of Duty games running on our E3 demo server recently.
(3) Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that's where the server is. I get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. My final delay will be 10 milliseconds as I just added a server in Irvine California yesterday, but it's not added to our grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay I personally would get, the good news is I don't notice it anyway.)
(4) This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I'm not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.
(5) We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn't take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don't need them, and so our costs will be much less. ;)
(6) We designed this for the real internet. The video compression codecs change in realtime based on the need of the application (or game), and based on the hardware & bandwidth you have. (For Photoshop we make sure it's pixel perfect.)
Gaikai Technology Demo (JULY 1, 2009) from David Perry on Vimeo.
No date has been set for a public release of Gaikai, but Perry is requesting participants from California for closed beta testing. Beta testing will later be open for the US, followed by beta testing for Europe. Gamers who are based in California can sign up by visiting Gaikai.com.
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