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.)"

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.