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Dave Perry Shows Off Cloud Gaming Service "Gaikai"
jasoncart writes "Veteran gaming man Dave Perry has shown off his OnLive-rivalling, cloud gaming service called Gaikai in a new video that is drawing a lot of attention. As you can see from the video, Perry plays World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Mario Kart 64, Spore and more — all running on a bog-standard computer through the Gaikai website, itself running in a normal version of Firefox."
More details about the service are available at Perry's website. He spoke about Gaikai in an interview a few months ago, and he seems confident that this will work better than OnLive (which we've discussed in the past).
GaiKai is a name destined for failure. He's obviously not in Marketing.
This thing installed on tier 1 internet server might bring large portion of MS Windows and nVidia value to zero. If it really works as advertised, sell shares of above companies.
839*929
http://www.bog-standard.org/
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
What exactly is the point of having games run in The Cloud, other than the wish to remain buzzword compliant? It seems like such a waste of network resources, and a pointless centralization of computing resources as well.
Frankly, I can't wait for the "cloud computing" bubble to finally burst.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
So... they're using the <video> tag, and use javascript to redirect the input to the remote server?
There are some (quite important) things missing from the video:
:D ), where one would be using a subscription service to be able to play a big library.
- Why no mention of what connection he is on? Or for that matter, why no mention of where the server is located? (besides some vague "Oh, I've never been as far from a server as I am at the moment!")
- Where's the fullscreen? I can see how it would be quite hard to properly stream current screensizes (such as 1680x1050, or even 1280x1024)
Other than that, I noticed a few odd things, such as:
- When playing MarioKart 64, at the end he all of a sudden crashes into a wall, which he tells is because "he hasn't been playing the game for quite some time"; Seems quite odd, and looked more like it had to do with the actual command not properly coming through.
- Howcome he's allowed to have MK64 running on an emulator anyways? I thought it was illegal to do so (even if you have the game yourself); though I might be wrong on that.
Whereas I like the idea (but can't see myself using it in the next decades), I think the price has to be really low for people to actually use it. Though I can definitely see a use for it for some new sort of console (Phantom, anyone?
Still, I always wondered how this would scale if it got really popular: I can't imagine a computer being able to stream multiple high-graphics game for multiple clients.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
I'm certainly not signing up for anything that absolutely requires an active high bandwidth connection to play single player offline games until companies like Comcast have been brought to heel.
They're already complaining about those pesky high-bandwidth users, they aren't upgrading their infrastructure, and they're charging fees for just about anything they can think of. Now wait until their metered plan really takes off, and tell me about gaming in the cloud. Any savings from hardware cost with this setup will be eaten by increasing ISP charges.
Besides, really, aren't we reaching the point where mandatory PC upgrades for games are much farther apart, really mitigating that factor?
So I look at this and think "some machine, some where has to be running the code". When you play flash games, all the work is being done on your local machine. When I play wow, its pegging a 2ghz processor to the extent it slows other things running in the background noticeably. When you start doing complex work in photoshop, your limitation is often the amount of memory in the machine running it. While this is awesome for streaming content from remote servers, I really question the ability to provide the server resources to run these applications in any sort of high volume situation. What would the system requirements be to be able to run 10,000+ users through a single machine?
No one says you can't still run things locally if you want to. Why do people see something that isn't a good fit for them, and immediately think it's an either/or thing?
Because the publisher of a specific game might choose to make it an either/or thing by releasing it exclusively on one of these services.
This whole system is for people who want to play on the go
On the go? In that case, let me know when EVDO or HSPA bandwidth can keep up with this service, both per second and per month.
or who are new to a game and want to try it out.
I imagine that playing a twitch game in such a laggy environment as a "rental" will leave the player with a poor impression of its control feel.
If standard multiplayer gaming, which involves far less data being sent back and forth between players, still doesn't properly work and often ends up in disconnections, lag and desync issues, I seriously doubt they'll fare any better, bar having servers in every major city in the world with fiber connections linking them together. At that point, the price tag would probably be so high it would become useless to subscribe. Sure, right now it's looking good with a handful of players all set in perfect conditions (see OnLive with a few dozens of players at most), but if they get a couple thousands, their stuff will crawl to a halt or they'll need to severely diminish the quality of what you're getting (be it smaller resolution, worse graphics fidelity, faster/worse looking encoding or a mix of all that and more). Remember they have to send the commands from the client, then stream the video and the audio back. Since it's unlikely they'll send that unencoded (otherwise it'd never run on 1Mb/s), they have to encode both live while not losing too much quality; that surely means a large impact on maximum performance.
I seriously don't see that working anytime soon, except if it is 100$/month in South Korea only.
While some claim that bandwidth isn't up to snuff, and maintaining enough servers to support a massive number of gamers is not feasible, etc, etc, this will all change in a short amount of time. This type of service is on the cusp of being a reality, and it will change computing forever. If a video game can be supported through a remote terminal, then ANY application could be supported. Eventually more and more apps will be available only on the cloud, and hardware costs will go down, then you'll find that 20 years later only dumb terminals exist in the hands of the average consumer. As wireless connectivity matures even phones will all just be dumb terminals. You never need to upgrade your phone, unless you want a bigger screen or different input method. The applications you RENT will be unpiratable, because there is no publicly available platform to run them on, and you can use the same app across your desktop and phone, but with modified interfaces as the device would report it's capabilities to the cloud, and the cloud would change the interface appropriately.
How does linux fit into all of this? Will there be a new ideological movement in the future to keep processing power in the hands of consumers? How do you install linux on a dumb terminal?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
If they release it exclusively, then choose another game that plays locally.
Do you have some tips on how I can convince a family member who has specified a specific title on a wish list to want a different game instead? If one really wants to play Halo 3, for instance, Metroid Prime 3 isn't a close enough substitute.
ultimately it boils down to "640k should be enough for anybody" - stuff will only get faster
Not necessarily. If I'm in Chicago, and their servers are in Virginia and California, the speed of light establishes a lower bound on the latency between a keypress and its reflection on the client.
pipes bigger, etc. These are early days.
The reality of the non-market for Internet access in the United States is that "early days" will last significantly longer than if there were a market.
The same technology underlying remote desktop or similar systems is whats at work here - send a frame buffer - raw pixel rectangles - down the wire after some compression.
Most of the compression works on the idea that the delta doesn't change to much from frame to frame so they only send data about what did change. When that isn't true, say in the case of gaming, VNC clients stop working well. Certainly, they stop working well under a 1mbit connection.
Now there are a lot of VNC technologies out there - why haven't any of them gotten this right before? How come this guy can magically do what those vendors couldn't?
I'm sincerely asking. I would think it'd be damn hard to send high quality video streams of your desktop at some constraint network capacity.
Theres three explanations: this is snake oil, this company has developed a really awesome new compression scheme, or at least something was missing from that video.
The ping requirements make this unfeasible. As more "casual" people get connections that trade-off bandwidth for latency (such as wireless broadband or just plain crappy ISPs that 80% of the US has to deal with) I don't see how this could ever be usable except for a select few.
Well, the speed of light is pretty fast...like, for all practical purposes instantaneous for the distances we're talking about.
Twitch games, such as Tetris Shirase, can be totally ruined with even 33 ms (two frames at 60 Hz) of additional lag. A round trip from Chicago to LA and back is 5600 km. At the speed of light, that takes 18.7 ms, not even counting router delays.
It needs a better backer.
Seriously, David Perry is a shitheel in the gaming community.
Acclaim's 2moons is so bot and hack infested as to be nearly unplayable.
Likely because no one at Acclaim, and certainly not David Perry, has written a line of code in a decade.
Welcome to Outsourced Gaming.
How about being able to stream your own games like this when you're on the go. Say I'm at a friends who has a good net connection, nice screen, but some crippled onboard video (not to mention I'm not going to bring my games and do the install/update/patch setup the config thing). It would be nice to log into your own 'kaigai' server and play your collection. Sell me this as a product instead of a service and I'm onboard.
First off, from what I saw both these models (OnLive and Gaikai) seem to be based on you buying the games through them.
If so, what about games I already own? I own games on physical media (like Spore) that are already on the catalog for Gaikai. I also own digital copies of games bought through Steam. Am I completely out of luck trying to use anything I already own with such a service?
What if I want to mod my game? It's incredibly common for people like WoW players to use addons for enhancing functions and features in the game. And I know there are lots of Spore mods out there.
Also, I see a lot of EA titles as listed games. Last time I bought a game as a digital download from EA (the Battlefield 2142 expansion), they would only allow me to download it for 6 months. If I needed to re-install after that time and needed the installer file, I'd have to buy it again. (Note: They may have changed this kind of policy...... I'm just speaking for what I experienced.)
I think most of us are going to be very cautious about purchasing games from small startups without some assurance that we'll still be able to play them if the company goes under. I'd think an agreement from EA and the other publishers that we would have full download rights to games purchased through one of these services ONLY if they go bankrupt/close down would be a big motivation for trying them out.
Add 17 switches, 8 routers, 400 miles of fiber, a few hundred yards of TP copper, and some database and/or application server interaction, and you're looking at the difference between being able to run at native capability and in a 400px window at 30fps.