Gaikai Ramping Up Open Beta

Gaikai, the cloud gaming service currently under development, has begun its open beta phase, sending out first 1,000 and then 10,000 invites to players who requested them. Dave Perry said in a blog post that they will continue sending out invites in batches of 10,000 until they pin down any outstanding server issues. His post also includes video of a player streaming Mass Effect 2 to a Linux system. "We are working with lots of publishers / retailers / media sites / electronics makers / telecom companies etc. We have at least 60 deals in the pipe at some stage. (You can imagine how nuts that is to manage.) ... Everyone will be getting invited in batches, and if you are too far from our servers, don't worry — you've actually helped, as you've shown us where we need to install more data centers. (We're effectively reverse-engineering the internet, letting the traffic show us where the best data center position would give access to the most people.)"

Comments

*sigh*

[wildstoo]

First of all, since links are conspicuously missing from TFS:

http://www.dperry.com/archives/news/dp_blog/gaikai_open_bet/

Secondly, the framerate in that ME2 video is shockingly bad, and gives no indication of how laggy the controls are (I'm guessing: very).

I'm still not convinced this can be more than vaporware until the latency can be brought to 10ms or less, which isn't going to happen with any regularity on the Internet we have.

Re:two articles in a row?

[causality]

/. is certainly drinking the cloud-flavored kool-aid

They decided to take a short break from every little thing Google does, every little thing Apple does, sending balloons to the stratosphere and calling it "space", and never writing a negative book review yet having YRO stories that promote free speech. They decided to take a long break from well-deserved criticism of Microsoft.

It's premature to say whether clouds will become the next SCO in terms of article count but they're definitely trying.

Re:two articles in a row?

[hairyfeet]

The sad part is in all likelihood all these "in the cloud!" services for home users will most likely end up just like "On the Internet" ala the dotBomb bust. Why is that? Because I'm in one of the "test markets" for the new cap, and talking to friends in other states there are similar 'test markets" being set up by the other ISPs. Want to know what the new caps are gonna be? It is 36GB for residential, and 76GB for business!

That's right folks, prepare to get stuck on the short bus to the information superhighway, all in the name of ever higher profits! From what I've been told if it ain't Youtube or Netflix or MSFT windows, you're screwed. Youtube and Netflix because they are setting up local servers ala Akamai and Windows because they're gonna set up a WSUS that'll feed all Windows updates locally. Everything else? Hits the cap.

It would be nice if we actually had a free market when it comes to ISPs, but in a good 80% of the USA from what I've seen it is strictly a duopoly with DSL and cable, with both cherry picking like mad. Hell many like my mom that are just two blocks from the end of the line can't get anything, because without competition the duopolies just don't bother. I know in my own area the duopoly hasn't moved a single inch in any direction since the late 90s. So fire up those torrents boys, the party she shall soon be over. If what I heard from the guy helping to set up the local backend is true (and I have no reason to think it isn't) they will be rolling out the uber-shitty caps nationwide in either mid summer or early fall next year, depending on how long it takes to set up the backend.

So unless you are one of the lucky ones with FIOS the odds of getting to enjoy any of the "in the cloud!" services without buying your own T line will be pretty slim after that. All hail ever increasing profits! Oh and in case you are wondering NONE of the local cableco services will be affected by the cap, so I hope you enjoy their offerings! I bet all the "let the market decide!" types here at /. are gonna be REAL happy net neutrality died then, huh?

I tested this a couple of days ago

[ninjacheeseburger]

It does work, but there defiantly needs to be improvement.
I was using my uni's 55mb connection, and the resolution wasn't very good, even when I selected full screen there were massive black bars round the game. The anti-aliasing needs to be turned up as well as even the cut scenes looked horrible.

Control wise the game was playable but I had major difficulty aiming with a sniper rifle.

I believe the idea is to offer instant demos to people on game sites instead of just adverts and trailers, instead of onlive's approach of buying and playing games. If this is the case I could see this being a useful service even if the quality isn't great, I'd never played Mass Effect before and this allowed me to get a taste of the game without downloading GBs of content just for a quick demo.