July 2nd, 2009

Gaikai Game Streaming

When you say Gaikai, you say revolutionary technology, and revolutionary in this context means the possibility to play on line in your browser ANY game you want. Gaikai comes in with an extremely new approach – it hosts the games, runs them, updates hardware and software streaming them to the users, that is why it is called the “Streaming Worlds”. All is there to be needed is a browser and internet access. Browser’s ability to give free streaming of video enables the flow to be fast, efficient and reliable. The Gaikai puts its service at your disposal with a high resolution, high quality steam with stereo sound.

The developer David Perry made a demo of the new Gaikai game streaming showing a variety of games from Mario Kart 64 to World of Warcraft in only one browser window. The question that one raises is in what way this new Gaikai approach differs from its previous OnLive? The point is that OnLive is striving to get an audience that sits comfortable in the living room and play this feature. It is quite a struggle since they have to put up with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo by trying to gain more players, thus “stealing” them from the above mentioned corporations.

Gaikai plan is to help developers and publishers to change the manner in which people discover their games. Once sold the technology to the publishers it will enable them to save a fortune on advertising, and they will be the ones to worry about how the users are charged. Gaikai at the moment are not licensing, publishers can host the games through Gaikai service, and therefore no license dealing is requested.

Launching in the public will happen in California, and depending on how this launch goes, the open beta will start going nationwide. Up to now there are a lot of companies that have started licensing the last Rockfree game even before they have finished developing it, and in this light they will reach the level of having an incredible amount of player traffic in the following 6 months. The partnerships they have with GameInvestors and Acclaim are great. These two companies incorporate very talented people, and Acclaim, for instance, has now over 10 million players, but for the time being the main focus of Gaikai is to develop games with no frictions.

They are still working to develop the Open beta, but the results are yet to be seen in the progress at Rockfree Web site. Gaikai is still considered to be one of the first companies to promote free playing and this aspect is gaining more reality in the USA, whether you like it or not.