Gaikai has put its gloves on and will soon be going head-to-head with OnLive.
OnLive was the first major cloud gaming service to launch to the general public, but it isn’t the only company that wants to try its hand at the platform. While OnLive has been testing the business in the field, recently dropping monthly fees, competitor Gaikai has been sitting back and watching while developing its own service. Gaikai’s David Perry now says that his cloud gaming service will be put in gamers’ hands this month, and will be out of beta by the end of 2010.
Speaking to VG247, Perry revealed that Gaikai is “feature complete.” However, he admits that the service hasn’t really been seen by many people. “The problem is we have not had the mass market real gamers come and play this,” he said. “We’ve had publishers playing, but we haven’t had real gamers.”
Those “real gamers” should get a crack at Gaikai by the end of October, with Perry adding: “The minute that announcement comes out of who we’re gonna partner with, we’ll start sending out invites immediately.” Perry said that these invites will go out 60 days before a planned launch in “probably mid-December,” which would mean they’re going to hit people’s email addresses soon.
Perry spoke optimistically about the operation of his service, saying that by December: “There will be no ‘you’re in a beta.’ It’ll just be ‘go ahead and play.” This would indicate that Gaikai expects to have a full-on cloud gaming service working perfectly by the end of the year.
We’ve seen Gaikai run World of Warcraft on an iPad, and the company also plans on partnering with developers such as Adobe to run non-gaming applications like Photoshop, so the service is already set up to differentiate itself from OnLive. If Gaikai can actually pull off what it’s claiming to be able to do, it should be an interesting addition to the cloud computing space.
Source: VG247
