Gaikai Brings World of Warcraft to the iPad

Gaikai is one of those services that see the future as being cloud computing-powered and tries to bring videogames into that future, the gamer being able to play any title without actually buying any physical media or installing any videogame on the local machine. Now, Dave Perry, the public face of Gaikai, showed how the future might look by posting an image showing World of Warcraft, the most popular subscription-based MMO, running on the recently launched iPad from Apple.

Perry said on his blog that “We're really interested to see what works well with streaming and will be trying just about every genre of game, on every device possible as we explore server-side computing. This is World of Warcraft streamed from a Gaikai server over regular Wifi.”

Ever since the iPad was unveiled by Apple, a lot of companies have seen it as being a platform that can enable new kinds of gaming experiences with its touchscreen and its portability. Analysts are seeing it as a potential threat to the Nintendo DS and to the PlayStation Portable and their successors.

One problem with the iPad is that it lacks the actual computing power to run the newest videogames, which ask a lot from hardware. A service like Gaikai, which runs the game on a powerful server somewhere and just streams the results to the local machine, could solve that problem and make the iPad a device on which the player can enjoy the same kind of experiences delivered on the PC or on consoles as long as the touchscreen can be used to control the experience.

The image Perry offered is a static one, meaning the actual performance of World of Warcraft on the iPad could at the moment be limited but the possibilities are definitely present for those who would like to satisfy their MMO addiction on the go.