14 DAY TRIAL // Gaikai is a very young business and one with an yet unproven business model but the leader of the company is confident that it can get more than 100 million users before the end of next year.
Speaking during an interview with GamesIndustry.biz David Perry, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Gaikai, has stated, “We are targeting 100 million as quickly as we can possibly get there. We need to get above the reach of any single game entity in the industry a quickly as we can.”
He added, “The ability to pull a lever and have a million people play your game is something that’s crazy to even think about today. That’s a very difficult problem, yet with cloud gaming that will be really quite straight forward. A normal way of thinking will be, ‘I want another million and another million’.”
Perry believes that the video game industry needs to make it easier than it is at the moment for interested players to try out games and then move on to buying them.
The CEO also says that the biggest challenge for Gaikai going forward is to make sure that the infrastructure behind the service is very solid and that downtime is either very small or nonexistent.
He compared the level of service that Gaikai needs to offer to be close to that offered by Amazon, which also depends on allowing its users to access any content at any time, without any disruptions.
Gaikai is focused on streaming video games, allowing players who do not have very powerful hardware to get access to recent releases and older classics.
The games are running on company maintained server farms while the input information, the graphics and the sound are being sent to the player's machine.
Gaikai content can be embedded in websites and can be used on a number of Internet enabled appliances.