Thursday, July 1, 2010

Gaikai's cloud bussiness model: play games for free in your browser

Interview with Gaikai's Dave Perry on Joystiq:
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/06/30/dave-perry-on-the-innovation-of-gaikai/

Gaikai focuses on delivering game demo's, not complete games: you see an advertisement of a game on a website (could be Gamespot, EA.com, Eurogamer) or read a game review, and with just one click you can play a demo of that game in your browser without paying a cent. The game publisher pays for your playing time, 1 cent per minute per user.
This approach is economically safer, more practical and more retail/publisher/gamer friendly than what OnLive is doing. With the current network infrastructure of the internet and its bandwidth limitations, this is probably the most successful route for cloud gaming. Gaikai has already signed EA (http://games.venturebeat.com/2010/06/17/gaikai-signs-ea-as-digital-distribution-partner/), so I think cloud gaming is gonna get big pretty soon.

UPDATE: another video of OnLive, showing mouse latency in F.E.A.R. 2 behind a router: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edf5xsqST90

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