Gaikai Ramping Up Open Beta 44
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.)"
Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Google - get your wallet out... (Score:4, Interesting)
Man ... why dont google buy this company ? It strikes me combining this with the GoogleTV platform would be a pretty nice marriage....
N.
Re:Trial in second life too (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Consider AGP (Score:3, Interesting)
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).