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Gaikai Drawing Interest With Low-Key Demo, Believable Claims
Earlier this week, we discussed news that games industry veteran Dave Perry had posted a demo of his upcoming cloud gaming service Gaikai. Now that people have had time to speak with Perry and evaluate the demo, reaction has been surprisingly positive. Quoting Eurogamer: "What struck me about the presentation was that there was absolutely nothing unbelievable in it whatsoever. There were no claims of streaming 720p gameplay at 60 frames per second — games were running in differently sized windows according to how difficult they were to compress, and video itself runs at the internet standard 30FPS. There was no talk of world-beating compression systems that annihilate the work of the best minds in video encoding today, the demo was using the exact same h264 codec that we use ... And finally, there was nothing here to suggest that we were looking at a technological breakthrough that would make our PS3s and Xbox 360s obsolete... just that this was a brand new way to play games in an ultra-accessible manner." By contrast, OnLive was received with much more criticism, in part due to their dramatic promises. While playing online games with Gaikai will naturally add some amount of latency, the article points out that single-player games need not lag more than you'd expect from a console controller. Meanwhile, unlike OnLive, Gaikai is not trying to compete directly with the major console manufacturers, instead trying to work with them in order to deliver their first-party games to new audiences.
Sell out?
Who'd buy these guys, a gaming company or a streaming media company?
Stop giving it press.
Gaming is already ultra-accessible, this is the solution to a problem that, for consumers, doesn't exist. The only people this will benefit is the game companies.
I will not rent my game software.
Um... yes? "How many Nintendo games are going to appear on OnLive? The answer is none," Perry adds. "And some of the best games in the world are from Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft... I'm already talking to Nintendo. I'm talking to all the major publishers.
So in the end this service is going to end up as nothing more than PC games? Its not a good sign when a company who makes most of the classic games that people remember rejects your ideas, and I'm not sure Sony or MS wants to jump on the bandwagon (though it wouldn't surprise me if MS bought the company if they managed to turn out a decent product).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
How exactly are they reducing the latency from the controller to the cloud? Let alone the roundtrip latency of the video/sound.
Anything more than 100ms ping time is gunna kill this thing.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'd see the biggest benefit of something like this is NO CHEATING, which is the bane of most PC games, FPS types especially. It's pretty hard to be running a wall hack on your client if you only get sent an already rendered image from a central server!
Cloud huffing. Although you'll want to be sure of what's in the cloud before you huff it. A tubgirl when you expect it the less can knock you out.
You just got troll'd!
Think of this...
You're at home, you log onto Gaikai, and see a PS2 RPG you always wanted to play. Awesome! So you start playing it on the PC. The next day, you have to fly out somewhere (business trip, home for the holidays), and while you're at the airport, you use your iPhone and continue playing your game. No need to copy your emulator files over, deal with incompatibilities, buggy software (there isn't even a ps2 emu for iPhone and I doubt its powerful enough). While on your trip, you decide to retire for the night. You bring up your laptop, and can once again resume your PS2 RPG.
I think this will open a whole new market for gaming to people who either never own consoles or people that do own consoles, and want to play last generation titles that they missed out on and no longer own the older system or don't; have it hooked up anymore (especially now that Sony took out PS2 backwards compatibility)
I hear what you are saying, but there is a chicken and egg problem here. All of these games run on emulators of last gen systems. I could see how a service *like* this could kill consoles, but not *this* service. The way this service works, there needs to be games and a system for which the games came out on. What do you want the developers to program their games for if this kills the consoles and no new consoles come out? PC (will we come full circle)? The console makers have to make the consoles, in which the developers then create games based around (using the hardware and software dev kits from Sony, MS, and Nintendo). That defines how the games will come out.
These guys are one step down the food chain and simply take the games that already came out for the consoles, and put them online. I don't see how anyone would object to this. It's very easy for Nintendo, or Sony. to only release certain titles on this network as to not interfere with their profit model.
Indeed. Actually I would have loved if Slashdot had been there since prehistory.
The hot air balloon is invented : "Oh noes now the evil government will use that to spy on its citizens from above!"
The telephone is invented : "Oh great, one more way for the government to effortlessly eavesdrop on our conversations!"
The television is invented : "Pfft, as if newspapers and the radio weren't enough means of government propaganda!"
Internet multiplayer games are invented : "Waaah waaah 500 ms latencies over my 33.6 modem"
Mankind is invented : "Oh great, so now I can meet people who'll try to rob me, kill me, defraud me or have offsprings with me!"
Romantic and sexual relationships with members of the opposite sex are invented : "If I wanted to coexist with living creatures who'd suck me and give me orgasms I'd get some leeches and stick porn on their backs"
Basements are invented : "HOLY FUCK SHIT YEAH!!"
You just got troll'd!
I've gone back to student life, and have a Core2Duo laptop with Integrated Intel graphics, and an internet connection that speed tests to 86,468kbps @ 0ms ping. I'd be happy to pay a small sum for this.
I'd love to have this available for personal implementation. Granted - I'm thinking of very niche use. But I've attempted similar things with VNC and WoW in the past - with painful results. I'm not expecting to take my remote display in to a raid or battleground. But it'd be nice to be able to do auction house tasks, crafting, mailbox, banks, etc. wherever I happen to be at the time; reasonably quick tasks where a little latency isn't an issue.
Of course - it looks like their intent goes well beyond this.
Imagine being at a friend's and being able to stream your own games in this method. That would be the best of both worlds, you have the killer rig at home for the latest and greatest, and you can stream your games while on the go.
This may be the future of gaming, eventually supplanting console and PC gaming.
Reasons :
1. This is a DRM system that would be nearly impossible to beat. As long as the game code is only given to these hosts, it would be vastly more difficult to pirate games. Not impossible - workers at the hosting company could leak the game to the internet, but it would be much more difficult.
Strong DRM means the publishers would get paid for every game they sell, yet they could easily offer fully functional 'demos' of the game, or sell time for a game. It might be easier for a lesser known publisher to sell 10 hours of a game for $10 than the entire game for $50.
2. It removes the need for the users to buy expensive hardware, whether that be a console or a high end gaming PC. You instead just lease time on the big iron. More advanced games with more advanced graphics would become available much sooner, since publishers wouldn't have to wait for the next generation of console to become common with consumers, or for PC owners to finally get upgrade their graphics cards. A publisher could offer games with state of the art, photo realistic graphics much sooner : it would just cost more per hour to play a game like that.
3. It solves the nightmare of hardware incompatibility and hardware failures. Since your netbook/living room console/old PC would merely be decoding video, there would be far fewer ways things could go wrong.
Problems : using flash is not a long term solution, flash has many problems : later generations of this service will need their own, optimized decoder code. ISPs will have to work with the companies offering hosted games, and configure their networks to deliver the ultra low latency, guaranteed bandwidth needed for a gaming session to actually work.
I think this idea is going to take off. It'll be a few years before ISPs really get their act together to support this kind of service, but it will gradually happen, and I think it will completely supplant the game console.
A big part of my job for the last ten years has been running game servers for PC-based video games (Counter-Strike, Battlefield, etc - your standard dedicated-server based games, mostly FPS).
Over the years as games have become more complicated, the trend has been for these games to consume more and more CPU. They support more players, they're doing complicated collision detection and physics and tracking stats and doing all sorts of other things. CPU usage and memory usage just goes up and up and up.
Say we can fit several hundred people (depending on the game type) on one, physical game server, spread out over several software servers running on it (usually just Windows applications). This isn't a huge amount - we have a /lot/ of physical servers, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear. We're just one of many game providers in Australia (population roughly 20 million). It is a massive investment to provide this many game servers.
Now, think about this from the perspective of doing all that crunching for the client side. We're not doing ANY of the rendering, or client side physics, or handling of input. When I start thinking about how to support that many game clients - the whole end-to-end experience - on normal hardware, I just can't figure out how many servers we'd need. We buy high-density blade servers - just asked our Ops guys, and apparently they do have expansion slots in which you could put a video card, but they're small slots so you couldn't put in, for example, a quad-SLI thing to try and crunch lots of video at once, or something.
So yeh, I'm super-curious to know how they plan to scale this sort of technology. I am interested in it from the perspective of reducing the impact of cheating in online games, but it also just sounds cool. I played with the OnLive stuff at GDC really briefly this year and it looked sort of cool, but I had the same questions (...which noone on the floor could, or would, answer).
I hate these silly game streaming ideas. Its too limiting. I would rather own my games and play them on my own hardware.
Its just a form of DRM. I would rather own POWERFUL computer hardware and the software I run on it.
Reading the comments already posted, I understand that some persons think that the service will be used to play games in whole (i.e. replace completly your PC or your console)... But if they'd RTFA, these persons would understand that Gaikai is mainly intented to demo games before getting them (now IMHO, that's a promising idea).
When are people going to start realizing that the "cloud" is an old idea with new hardware, and that reinventing a concept by putting it on the 'new' cloud platform isn't a business model that stands on its own?
Software developers have optimized their multiplayer games to only transfer the necessary information, and leaving the less important stuff to the rest of the clients. Thats why up to 5 people can play FPS online games at the same time without problems at my house (only 700KBit up/2.5MBit down DSL). With this technology that would be reduced 1 or at most 2 (estimate based on my experience with streaming movies). Who will pay the server that creates content in high quality based on complex calculations and on information of other clients AND compresses it good enough to go through my pipe without losing to much quality, in real time?
This whole system imho sounds like the regularly repeated idea, that a huge solar collector plattform placed in the dessert of North Africa could produce enough electricity for the whole world. Of course, it can. But no one lives in the dessert to use that power and transporting the power to where its needed is hard or impossible.
While that would rule out FPS, fighting, platformers and so on, strategy, puzzle and the like should work fine. This certianly doesn't look to be a be-all, end-all solution, but it could have applications. You'd get a slightly laggy feel from the UI but that isn't a show stopper.
They claim: We are not using any out-of-the-box virtualization, it's all custom built by our team for this purpose., or and similarly that its their own custom operating system (specifically so that the photoshop demo is a single window)
The company was formed in November 2008.
So, seriously: nothing unbelievable about that? I'd be wondering whose software they are really using there, because the development timescale doesn't add up. If they'd said nothing or said it was off-the-shelf tech that would be a bit more likely.
The iPod is invented: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
I'm with you on this one. I've never owned a gaming console in my life. I've never run a Windows operating system in my life (on my own system; at work we have them, but you can't install games on there). The only games I get to play are through DOSBox (no complaints there) or Flash games (a lot of complaints there). Yes, you can argue I've made my choice. I've chosen not to make video games a priority in my life and I have no right to complain. I agree: I don't have a right to complain; but I certainly have a right to get excited about things like this :D
It doesn't mean what you think it means. Reading comprehension obviously isn't your strong suit, but please do try to pay attention to the conversation here (psst - your troll is showing).
About twenty years ago, a friend of mine excitedly told me about a project to send movies over standard phone lines. The "inventor" was looking for investors, since he'd "solved" the problem . . . these were to be full quality movies. Note that 56k modems weren't available yet . . .
I explained to him that that person couldn't possibly be doing what he was doing, given the theoretical limits based upon the way the US phone system worked, but he insisted.
Several months later, I saw the news article on the arrest of someone in that city for a scam to get people to invest in a phony movies over telephone line.
Today, sure, but at the time, a 14.4k was still "fast" and expensive . . .
hawk
P.S.=> One day, instead of just being a network tech (which is ALL you are, & all guys like that do, face it, is read manuals of the tools guys like myself as a coder, create for YOU, to use, USER (network admin & network tech? USERS WITH A BETTER PASSWORD THAN NORMAL USERS, but that is about it - yes, I can say that, as I function as both in this science & I KNOW which is the more difficult of the two, & which takes more know-how)... & personally? I could care less if a flock of *NIX "network admins" (lol, users with a better password & that is ABOUT IT, compared to coders, who create the tools you manual/man page reading DRONES, merely use)... apk
Wow. An attitude like that really shows why you don't know what you're talking about. But I went ahead and responded to you since I seemed to bother you so badly that you're compelled to spend so much time on me:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28604931
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28610457