Remember OnLive? The tiny console that is supposed to be released in the future that allows you to stream any game to your TV with 1 millisecond ping times? Well this tops that. No software to install, no system requirements besides an internet connection. Seems like you could use this service to play Crysis quality games on a 6 inch net book...
Gaikai is a revolutionary new technology that lets you play any game online in your browser. In the age of the cloud, when all your documents, email, photos and videos are instantly reachable online, it seems archaic that you still need to install gigabytes of game files on an expensive PC with an even more expensive video card. And even then you can only play from that specific computer!
Gaikai takes a radical new approach – we host the games, we run them, we worry about hardware and software updates, and we stream them to you. Full resolution, full speed, stereo sound, low lag, no compromise. The only thing you need is a browser and an internet connection.
We call this Streaming Worlds, taking the full richness of modern computer games to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
From: http://www.dperry.com/archives/news/...aikai_-_video/
Our Gaikai team has been working really hard for the last year, we demonstrated our tech privately at GDC, then LIVE (hands on) to most of the major publishers at E3.
For the people that visit my blog, I wanted to flick through some demos and show the experience under the following conditions:
(1) No installing anything. (I'm running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)
(2) This is a low-spec server, it's a very custom configuration, fully virtualized. Why? To keep the costs to an absolute minimum. We had 7 Call of Duty games running on our E3 demo server recently.
(3) Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that's where the server is. I get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. My final delay will be 10 milliseconds as I just added a server in Irvine California yesterday, but it's not added to our grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay I personally would get, the good news is I don't notice it anyway.)
(4) This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I'm not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.
(5) We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn't take 7 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.
(6) We designed this for the real internet. The video compression codecs change in realtime based on the need of the application (or game), and based on the hardware & bandwidth you have. (For Photoshop we make sure it's pixel perfect.)
(7) Our bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games. (Works with Wifi, works on netbooks with no 3D card etc.)
(8) If you hear any clicks, they are coming from my wireless headset microphone. I won't use that next time I promise.
(9) I made a few video cuts using Windows Movie maker to cut out dead air. Like Need for Speed has far to many menus with loads & delays between them. So I tried to keep the pace up so you see plenty of demos
(10) I keep getting asked what operating system we use. We are completely OS agnostic, some demos come from Linux, some come from Windows and will ultimately support streaming from MAC servers too.
Publishers, you know how to contact me if you want to be in our Private Closed Beta. (There's no work involved.)
Investors, just ping me on info@gaikai.com if you feel you can add strategic value to this project.
Service providers, we have all our needs covered, but if you want to contact us for some reason, again just use info@gaikai.com
Gamers, we want closed beta testers, especially if you live in California, so please sign up at www.gaikai.com Please add a note that you live in California.
We are not in competition with any other streaming company or technology, our business model is entirely different. I will be talking about it more during my up-coming speeches at video game conferences. (Develop this month, and GDC Europe are the next two.)
Our goals are really simple, to remove all the friction between hearing about a game and trying it out, to help reduce the cost of gaming, to grow video game audiences, to raise the revenue that publishers and developers can earn, and (most importantly) to make games accessible everywhere. If the iPhone App store has taught us anything, when you make it easy to check things out, you get a billion downloads.
I look to sites like Kongregate.com, I made a list of their most popular Flash games and just that first page of hits had 61 million plays on it. There are an estimated 20,000 Flash game sites on the web. That's a TON of players looking for great content! We can supply all that content with a single click.
The professional games industry has never had acess to those countless millions of clicks, but now they do:
Gaikai Technology Demo (JULY 1, 2009) from David Perry
Last edited by Sum Yung Guy; 2009-07-05 at 12:00 AM.
It looks interesting - I've signed up. But I don't expect anything for a long time.
Still, my thoughts about it are the same as OnLive - until I've experienced it first-hand, I'm sceptical that there'll be no lag, that the quality will be good, and that it'll be real-time (as in my key presses will affect the game instantly - I don't want to be killed because the server took a few moments to register that I'd done something). Yeah, the video looks good, but in this day of canning footage, a first-hand experience is always the most telling.
One of my biggest interests in Computing is the Cloud, and I'm always interested to see something that makes good use of it.
One question, which my quick skim of the post didn't answer, is fees and all that - OnLive has a number of developers behind them which obviously means they've got games. Is GaiKai doing it legally (not that it's stopped any of us before, mind)?
Hybrid Mode
