14 DAY TRIAL // David Perry, Chief Creative Officer for Acclaim and creator of Earthworm Jim, has revealed Gaikai, a new cloud computing-based videogaming service, which is set to be ready for showing in an open beta to all interested publishers and looking for funding for further development.
On the surface, Gaikai seems pretty similar to OnLive, another cloud gaming initiative shown earlier this year. People do not need to buy nor install games, they just require a PC connected to the Internet and a decent connection. Perry is promising that Gaikai would require no install and that everything will be running directly in a web browser.
The demo shown had Perry play games on a server that was 800 miles away. The delay is 21 milliseconds at the moment but the team is aiming to get to 10 milliseconds before the Gaikai service is finally released.
The games played were Spore, Need for Speed Pro Street, LEGO Star Wars, World of Warcraft and Mario Kart 64 running in an emulator. The demo also showed a video of gameplay being replayed and it all looked smooth. Apparently, players will not access a centralized site to get the games but they will be launching them right on the website of the publisher.
David Perry also compared Gaikai with OnLive, saying that “We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn't take seven 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.”
A lot of industry insiders are saying that any cloud gaming videogaming service needs to overcome the hurdles generated by the fact that information, and lots of it, needs to travel potential long distances before getting to the machines of gamers. It will be interesting to see whether Gaikai gains enough traction to become a reality in a few years.