14 DAY TRIAL // The founder of games on demand service Gaikai has declared that he wants it to go live at some point during December of this year, with no beta period before the official launch date and with a host of partners that will deliver the most important title of the moment.
Talking to VG247 at the GDC Online event in Austin the founder of Gaikai, David Perry, has stated, “We said we’d be done by the end of September, and we are. We’re feature complete. You see it running from Dallas. That’s the experience that people are gonna have. So the problem is we have not had the mass market real gamers come and play this. We’ve had publishers playing, but we haven’t had real gamers.”
He added, “The minute that announcement comes out of who we’re gonna partner with, we’ll start sending out invites immediately. And we’re gonna do that for 60 days. So we are 60 days from the start of those invites to launch.”
Gaikai is a cloud based video game delivery service, which allows for modern titles to be delivered to gamers through web browsers in embedded form.
The idea is that the player does not need to install a client, register on any site or install any new software, he only needs to access a certain site and get the same experience he would get normally by buying a gamer at retail.
Gaikai says that it will allow video game publishers to have the same wide audience as those who are creating web browsed video games.
The company will compete, in some respects, with the OnLive service, which recently announced that it was dropping membership fees, which makes titles on the service similar in price to retail launches, but without the flexibility of getting access to them for just a limited number of days.