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).

Comments

Re:Just needs a better name

[sopssa]

I must agree it looked to work somewhat nicely, but people are taking this cloud computing thing way too far. I want to run the stuff on my own box and not somewhere else. Aside privacy conserns, it doesn't make that much sense to run games via internet line. Theres lag issues, bandwidth issues, connectivity issues and latency issues. Sometimes the old model works better than the new 'cool' model.

Re:Notably missing from the video:

[PieSquared]

During the video he says he's using less then 1 Mb/s connection speed, though he doesn't say how much he actually has available. On the FAQ page he says the server is 800 miles away, but that he has a 21 ms ping.

It does also seem to me that fullscreen means more bandwidth. All that's going his way is the video, but streaming full-screen video is obviously more bandwidth intensive then streaming a lower resolution.

He crashes into the wall because he's stopped playing, as far as I can tell. I suspect he's using a gamepad or something, because playing mario cart with a mouse just isn't feasible. I assume he set the gamepad down, and then a second or so later we see the mouse going to the "close" button. And I believe that it's only downloading ROM's that's illegal. The emulator itself and using your own ROMs should both be fair use.

Honestly, I like the idea of remote-running programs - I'd assumed that's the way things would end up going as soon as I heard people actually buying netbooks. I think it's something I'll use extensively eventually. Of course, I completely reject the idea of letting someone else host them for me - I suspect eventually people will have home servers plus netbooks or something like that. So I won't be using *this* service, but I don't doubt that I'll eventually be running something like it. Also I'm certain I won't be running photoshop inside flash inside firefox. If this sort of thing gets popular there will be a custom application for it.