GaiKai Beta To Start In Europe "Later This Month"

Alison Beasley sends word that GaiKai, the cloud gaming service being developed by games industry vet Dave Perry, is about to begin beta testing in Europe. (Sign-up page.) GaiKai is a competitor to OnLive, which started beta tests of its own recently. IGN got a chance to try out GaiKai for themselves, and they've posted a video showing how it performed. From Perry's announcement: "Our closed beta has two goals. #1 is to bring our servers to their knees so we can choose the final configuration before we start ordering large quantities of them. (We think we have it worked out, but you can be certain our staff will be swapping cards and testing different processors as each day goes by.) Goal #2 is to test older computers. We've had lots of emails from people describing their computers and 99% of them have ample performance. Remember you don't even need a 3D card to see a 3D game run on our service. I know this is strangely counter to what people expect, but we actually want to get plenty of basic office-grade XP machines testing so we can make sure we can reach the widest audience possible. ... After we choose the hardware configuration in Europe, our next phase will be our USA Nationwide Network Test, that will be using 8 Tier-1 Data Centers, getting hammered by Closed Beta testers. During that process, [we] will be identifying the other data centers we need to include to blanket the USA in a low latency array. Phase 2 of that is Europe, in exactly the same test."

Casual Gamer

[dintech]

I assume this is going to be a subscirption type service? I'd love this if you could also use as a pay-as-you-go type of thing. I'm the sort of gamer who doesn't actually finish many games and only plays very infrequently.

Re:Streaming games

[slim]

Two comments on this:

1. Gaikai is going for a model where their servers are widely deployed at the "edge" of the Internet. That means negotiating with ISPs to locate servers near the modems. Part of that deal will involve having sufficient bandwidth for those servers and those protocols.

2. This kind of service is going to build customer demand for stable, fast, low latency connections. Presumably market forces will cause ISPs to provide.

Tell me this.

[thatkid_2002]

How the bloody hell is this meant to work. I have seen the videos but I still cannot believe it. How can they make it work across the Internet where we cannot even make it work at home on a Gbit LAN. Anybody have an idea of how all of this works? Special graphics driver?

Macs

[FishTankX]

Finally, Macs will have access to a huge game library. I can see the i'm a mac comercials I'm a mac And i'm a PC So Mac, did you hear that I signed up to this sweet new gaming service that gives me access to hundreds of games a year and I can pay by the hour so if I only pay a few hours a month I don't have to pay like $50 to play the newest title? Yeah, PC. I signed up too. It's pretty sweet. PC: Wait.. you play games? Competition. Crap. *cut to shot of PC and Mac having a halo competition with X-box 360 pouting in the corner, and PS3 being like 'WTF'*

Re:Tell me this.

[Svartalf]

Special software, yes. However it won't work in the large because as you pile more bandwidth on, the worse the latencies get, either because of UDP drops/retransmits or TCP packet delivery delays/retransmits.

The Internet's an unholy mess as far as game networking code is concerned. It might work for hundreds- it won't scale to the levels they need to relegate PC and Console gaming to the dustbin of history anytime soon.