Which is interesting, because that's only going half way with the potential of the service.

During the Beta, I was incredibly interested in the OnLive service because it would have enabled me to play games that I wouldn't otherwise have been able to play because of underpowered hardware. That was its selling point for me.

For instance, I played all the way through Borderlands on OnLive with fairly high graphic settings, when I wouldn't have been able to do so on my work laptop normally. I played through all of Crysis:Warhead on OnLive with a decent frame rate when it would have been nothing but a slideshow on even my desktop machine.

OnLive worked incredibly well for this purpose (actually playing games), *AS WELL AS* providing live demos of the games. The demos were interesting because they weren't manufactured-demos, they were just a limited-time use of the *actual* game. That, too, was a big deal to me.

If OnLive had had more actual *games* available to them, I would have bought some. I had actually *pulled the trigger* on a pre-order of Dragon Age: Origins, and then poof it disappeared from their games lineup on launchday and I got credited for it.

I guess what I'm saying is that Gaikai is missing the boat on one possible monetization of the service. I'm sure they're studying OnLive's business model and deciding that people like me are in a minority, and that it's not worth their time to try to go after me as a market segment. Which I can't fault them for.

I just think that if services like OnLive and Gaikai could strike deals with publishers for larger game libraries, then that side of the monetization would be viable.

A lot of that is related to the westward expansion. It's all relative to the established population of the eastern seaboard where everything else is West.

The second one isn't any better. Alaska is lumped in with the Pacific Northwest, despite being separated by 800 miles of Canada (and that's just to get to the lowest point, which isn't even close to the bulk of the state). North and South Dakota are lumped into the Rocky Mountain Region, even though the Rockies end half way through Montana, and have much more in common with the Central Plains, than they do the Rockies (here's a hint... on the western-most edge of North Dakota, is the Little Missouri National Grassland). Heck... you're probably closer to the Canadian Shield, than you are to the Rockies.

Whoever put those regions together has obviously never been to the places they're categorizing. They're also missing the border between WA and ID, and have an extra "n" on the end of the "Great Lakes Regionn". Not a stellar example of map-making.

Well, it's good to remember that political and physical geographic borders frequently fail to coincide. To use a recent example, I think that Milwaukee is definitely part of the midwest, but the plains and highland areas of Wisconsin probably are not.

Oh, certainly. But some of those regions don't seem to correlate with either.

Exactly. Attempting to define "regions" based on proximity of state boundaries to particular geological features is foolish. Regions are murky because they depend on history and culture as much as they do geography. Sometimes, if you're lucky, those coincide with state borders.

Bumping this back up, as it's been a very wild ride working at Gaikai over the past year. Looking back at my post from February, it's pretty amazing to me to see the progress made as we come to the end of this year. Back then, we were just doing some basic demos, now we have full agreements in place that have lead to being integrated into places like Walmart, EA, Origin (EA's online digital store), Escapist Magazine, and most recently, Youtube.

The tech has also advanced, with our service able to handle even the heavy hitters like Crysis 2 at full quality. The web site changed a few months back to really help showcase what we are doing, complete with every game we currently host being on one page (http://www.gaikai.com/games). No more hunting for stealth launches or blog posts, it's open to everyone within range of the expanding network.

Oh, and we recently moved into a new office that has some nice perks. The temptation to just go into work and play is very high now.

It's up on my new cube wall now too, though I photoshopped it to say Gaikai :-)

Dumb question: what's the latency on this thing? For twitchy games, is the latency enough that you can really notice it? Also, what's the bandwidth you need for a "high quality" game at "high resolution"?

That's really cool that you guys are doing well. Changing jobs is never an easy decision, and going to a startup carries even more risk. Glad it's working out.

I've never worked for a startup, but I did get a lot of great advice from people here on the BBS when I made my own decision to change jobs back in 2004. I'm very glad I pulled the trigger, even if there was some risk involved in moving to a new city and starting out as the new guy in a group full of people that were much smarter and more experienced than I was. Now I'm one of the older hands in the group, and the work is still challenging and rewarding some seven years later.

Very glad it is all going well, Tom! It is an awesome concept, and it looks like it is growing well.

Small companies can be so much fun! (admittedly I got sucked back into corporate world - now doing the same as I was when running my own company. Cons: the things you expect in a company of 170,000 people, like less fun, less excitement. Pros: much lower risk)

Surprisingly low latency, considering what they're doing. The technology is impressive. I played through all of Crysis:Warhead and Borderlands (okay, I was using OnLive for that but I've played Gaikai games to and they are similar), and although I could feel the latency it was never really annoying. I couldn't believe how quickly this process completes:
- My mouse click
- upstream to the server
- Game's own inherent frame-by-frame latency
- Game screen rendering to buffer
- Video encoding
- Video frame sent downstream to my PC
- Decoding on my end
- First frame of gun-firing animation on my end.
That's a huge amount of shit to wade through, and it felt to me like it was in the 100-200 millisecond range. That's just amazing.

I wouldn't do Unreal or Quake deathmatch that way, not because I don't think I could do it (it would certainly work), but rather because 100-200 milliseconds is the difference between win or lose when you're up against other human players. I suppose if all the other players were on the same streaming service so that they all had the same latency, then I would have no problem deathmatching that way.



DSL or cable modem are fine, as long as you're not streaming Netflix or doing a big FTP/BT download on the same line. If I had someone else doing something major on the household net connection, I wouldn't be able to play.

In the end, I was very interested in the technology and was seriously considering playing a lot of games that way. It's a perfect way to experience single-player games. The only reason I'm not doing it right now is that OnLive hasn't added any decent new games since they launched the service a year ago. It's simply a content thing. If they add some new games that I want to play, I'll log right back in and pony up the dough. And of course, Gaikai is positioning themselves differently, doing pretty much just game demos instead of full games, so that's a completely different thing. I'll try out any Gaikai game demo without hesitation, knowing that the technology works and that I'm getting an accurate representation of the game.

Without going into NDA territory, I will say the tech behind some of our our competition is different then the tech behind Gaikai. And they are all evolving and finding new ways to handle latency. On the Gaikai side, I've been able to see the improvements made over time to keep shaving little bits off here and there.

Bandwidth wise, as long as you can stream an HD (720p) video from YouTube without issues, Gaikai should also be just as smooth. Bandwidth can be very finicky based on how the internet works though, with packet loss and different routes impacting the practical bandwidth between a user and our servers. WiFi is also somewhat problematic at times due to how quickly the available bandwidth can change. Makes it all that more challenging to engineer these systems to be reliable

Tony, I'd be curious in your direct experience with Crysis on the different solutions out there.

It was the Crysis:Warhead sequel, and with OnLive, my only complaint was that the machines that were actually running the game weren't top-end, so the graphic settings weren't cranked. In other words, from my point of view, one of the best reasons to play Crysis on a cloud system was that the cloud server could be beefier than my puny home system. Which it was, but not by much. So I didn't really get to see Crysis in its full glory. Other than that, it worked just fine. I could feel the latency a bit, but for a single player game, that only means a slightly less crisp control feel.

Clearly what needs to happen is that the backend should be a quantum cluster that performs every possible action every quantum of time and then provides you with whatever result happened due to the action you actually made.

Sorry, should have been a little more clear. I'm wondering about your experiences between when you played the Crysis:Warhead game vs Crysis 2 on Gaikai. It's only the demo on Gaikai, but I'd be curious to hear if you notice any subtle differences between the two.

I didn't do a back to back comparison. I'll poke at Crysis 2 on Gaikai and report back.

I am trying from outside the US though.

As long as you just test the service and not the game itself as Crysis 2 was ridiculously disappointing.

I had a go on it last night and it worked fine in the UK.

Gaikai sounds like exactly what Sam needs

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/15627247

My problem with Crysis 2 on Gaikai was that once you get through the splash screens and intro videos and tutorial you're left with maybe 3 minutes to run around and get shot at before the demo time ends.

This looks like it will be interesting:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/10/gaikai-partners-with-lg-to-power-smart-tv-gaming-service/

That is cool.

It was fun watching this come together. The newer TVs in the pipeline have really slimmed down, and the electronics inside appear to be so simple due to the SoC technology being built in. One more device down in the vision shown off on the Gaikai banner

Nice development again. It seems Gaikai will now also stream complete games and not only demos. There will also be Facebook integration. Cool!

Sadly I still can't run Gaikai demos from home. Despite being able to happily play most current online games without any issues, Gaikai tells me I have packet loss:-(

Still think it looks exceptionally cool, and when my broadband gets above 1Mb I may be able to try it...

Ok, it's taken me a while, but now I've tried Gaikai for the first time. It works fine for me. I like the idea and the interface. I also like the cloud idea. I may be wrong, but Crysis 2 ran very smoothly on my Core2Duo system. And my video card is probably the oldest part of my entire system (a gforce 6600GT, but I don't game any more so I don't need anything more powerful) but still everything was fluent. I also like the ease of having the games at your fingertips should you decide you want to play a game. I see this going a long way, I really like this concept.

Err... congrats?

Hope you get a big fat check Tom!