Dave Perry shows off Gaikai

News - First footage of service running in normal browser offered

Veteran gaming man Dave Perry has shown off his OnLive-rivalling cloud gaming service Gaikai in a new video that is drawing a lot of attention.

As you can see, Perry shows off World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Mario Kart 64, Spore and more - all running on a bog-standard computer through the Gaikai website, itself running in a normal version of Firefox.

All the gaming you see is being played directly from a remote computer, and as you can see, despite nothing being stored locally, the games play rather smoothly. One thing worth noting is that the game window is rather smaller than the browser - a lower resolution stream potentially reducing bandwidth needs.

Interestingly, Gaikai will be all about the publishers-powering their games through Perry's technology. He puts it thusly: "People do not come to us to play games, they play the games right on the publisher's site. The publisher uses our technology to make it all possible. So from wherever you click, you end up on the publisher's site with the latest version of the game running instantly."

Rival cloud service OnLive, meanwhile, claims to be capable of streaming full high-definition video - although the feasibility of this has been questioned.

Perry says that Gaikai usually works with anything more than a 1Mb internet connection (sometimes less), and the service certainly seems to be in fine fetter.

Perry concludes stating that "our goals are really simple, to remove all the friction between hearing about a game and trying it out, to help reduce the cost of gaming, to grow video game audiences, to raise the revenue that publishers and developers can earn, and (most importantly) to make games accessible everywhere. If the iPhone App store has taught us anything, when you make it easy to check things out, you get a billion downloads."

How well these cloud services will run on 'normal', everyday internet connections is open to debate - but this Gaikai teaser has more than whetted our appetites, especially given that Perry is adamant that game servers are fairly standard, virtual affairs, while no fancy fibre optic link was employed for the demo, only a standard broadband connection.

A California-wide beta test is being planned.