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

Open?

[MrMarkie]

Doesn't an open beta suggest anyone can join, or does open beta mean that anyone can apply nowadays? Sounds more like a closed beta to me. Am I missing something?

SaaS and DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

The sooner these "Let's use the SaaS model to enforce our DRM Policy for our Games" idea dies, the better. They offer little benefit to the user, cross platform might be nice in theory but...

• The nature of SaaS is you as the consumer have little control, it's not like Steam where it least you have a local copy that could be cracked/unlocked if the company goes under, but here you're completely screwed in this case because it's all held and operated elsewhere.
• Want to know what's less ubiquitous than performance video rendering hardware for games? Low-Latency High-Bandwidth Internet connections. Latency is going to be a bitch with this in games which require quick response times and/or if you're too far away from the actual cloud and/or you're on a higher latency connection (Wireless, rural etc.). Bandwidth is also going to a bitch too seeing as it's inefficient and some, or most depending on your region, people have periodic bandwidth quotas.

Fact is, the only reason this idea is getting off the ground because of the benefits of a subscription model and the DRM mechanisms inherent in the system. The whole idea of "You don't need an expensive device to play our games!" is silly seeing as you need other decent stuff and sacrifice alot just to get that one or two benefits. It's a self serving model which does little for the consumer.
It's like replacing individual cars with big giant cranes all sprouting out from the centre of the city reaching out to get your capsule and lifting you to your destination.

*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:*sigh*

[Kokuyo]

Do you have under 10ms when gaming directly from your rig? I don't. Applying my Citrix experience to this idea, though, lets me agree with your expectations about the control issue.

We'll see whether this'll be the next big thing after 3D gaming soon enough, I'd assume. I'll reserve judgement until then.

Re:*sigh*

[ledow]

Er... you're missing the point. It's not the lag between you and your PC - that's ALWAYS present on whatever system. It's the lag between your PC wanting to processing the input and sending the relevant graphical output. On a conventional PC this is less than the time required for one frame (or else you wouldn't get the framerate that you do). On this system, it's a remote PC over a latent link, that's a lot more. You're still using monitors, USB peripherals and everything else and, yes, you may have slightest reduced *multiplayer* latency because you're effectively logging in remotely to a PC playing a LAN game, but the latency from control input being recieved to graphics card sending a signal to the monitor reflecting the output is VASTLY increased, by orders of magnitude in some cases.

The sub-50ms ping you get from a counterstrike server is only how long it takes the PC to talk to the other computer and get a reply (for a tiny packet). The latency problem here is inserted between the computer successfully receiving your input and then producing a graphic to represent that, where normally that is only limited by the bus and CPU speed of your computer, and where now you have to include a transport across an international network, another computer to perform those same calculations / bus transfers, and then another network transport.

You're basically VNC'ing into a bunch of computers playing a LAN game. Try it. Just because the remote computer gets "20ms ping" to the main server doesn't mean it's more responsive than just playing the game locally.

Google - get your wallet out...

[polyp2000]

Man ... why dont google buy this company ? It strikes me combining this with the GoogleTV platform would be a pretty nice marriage....

N.

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:Trial in second life too

[drinkypoo]

with one hour of in-world running around consuming about 1gb of traffic.

One gigabit doesn't sound like that much.

The real show-stopper is the name. Any name beginning with letters that look like "gay" is going to be endlessly mocked by young gamers, who are the ones buying the games in quantity.

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.

Consider AGP

[tepples]

Would the bandwidth use be less if they would replace the videostream with opengl/directX data?

If that were true, video cards would still be PCI. But the progression through AGP to faster AGP to PCI Express to multi-lane PCI Express showed that even the 1 Gbps of PCI is not enough for meshes and textures. Compare this to the video stream of a DVD (capped at roughly 9 Mbps) or Blu-ray Disc (capped at roughly 50 Mbps).