Gaikai Drawing Interest With Low-Key Demo, Believable Claims

Earlier this week, we discussed news that games industry veteran Dave Perry had posted a demo of his upcoming cloud gaming service Gaikai. Now that people have had time to speak with Perry and evaluate the demo, reaction has been surprisingly positive. Quoting Eurogamer: "What struck me about the presentation was that there was absolutely nothing unbelievable in it whatsoever. There were no claims of streaming 720p gameplay at 60 frames per second — games were running in differently sized windows according to how difficult they were to compress, and video itself runs at the internet standard 30FPS. There was no talk of world-beating compression systems that annihilate the work of the best minds in video encoding today, the demo was using the exact same h264 codec that we use ... And finally, there was nothing here to suggest that we were looking at a technological breakthrough that would make our PS3s and Xbox 360s obsolete... just that this was a brand new way to play games in an ultra-accessible manner." By contrast, OnLive was received with much more criticism, in part due to their dramatic promises. While playing online games with Gaikai will naturally add some amount of latency, the article points out that single-player games need not lag more than you'd expect from a console controller. Meanwhile, unlike OnLive, Gaikai is not trying to compete directly with the major console manufacturers, instead trying to work with them in order to deliver their first-party games to new audiences.

Re:Having read TFA...

[Delwin]

This isn't OnLive - that's the vaporware competitor to this. He's stated that Nintendo has already turned down OnLive but is talking to him about possibly bringing it's games to Gaikai.

Re:this is DRM

[Briareos]

And that's assuming that several people playing games on the same aircraft could even get enough bandwidth in the first place. Isn't the total bandwidth to one aircraft around 512kps?

Nevermind that - if you're going to use this on an airplane the lag (aka latency) is absolutely going to KILL you unless you're playing some turn-based game, and even there input lag will probably make you want to stop playing it.

np: Sweet Billy Pilgrim - Joy Maker Machinery (Twice Born Men)

Re:Did I miss the ping time revolution?

[Bangz]

In the video he talks about having a sub 20ms ping. I think the idea is that they would setup lots of smaller servers spread out geographically to reduce the amount of lag as much as possible. What people perhaps overlook is that games naturally have quite a large lag already, once you've pressed a button it takes up to 1 frame for that change to be registered, another frame to update the physics / animation etc, and finally a frame to render based on the previously calculated physics information. In a 30FPS game that's between 66-100ms, and that's assuming a really damn good engine which is responsive, which a lot of game engines aren't. There was an article on Gamasutra on this very topic [gamasutra.com] about a year ago, if you want to read more. If the check out the third page [gamasutra.com] of that article you'll see the response times for some popular games, and you might be suprised!

Re:No hacking

[Pinky's Brain]

There have been framebuffer capture based aim bots in the past already.

Next: timesharing!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

The next step in the evolution of gaming sofwtware is to host it on a large server -- what can we call it? Hmm, it's kind of centralized or main center of application execution; and they all execute in the same framework -- maybe Mainframework, or Mainframe for short? Once we do that, we can allocate slices of time to each game that's running -- at computer speeds, there would never be a noticeable delay to the user! We'll even have the screen rendering done on this "mainframe", and just push the screen to the end user.

When are people going to start realizing that the "cloud" is an old idea with new hardware, and that reinventing a concept by putting it on the 'new' cloud platform isn't a business model that stands on its own?

Re:wow

[Zebedeu]

The iPod is invented: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."