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Industry veteran David Perry has lifted the lid on Gaikai, the upcoming cloud gaming service, with a new video demonstration.
The video, which you can watch below, shows Perry himself run the game service through Firefox without using any plugins or installs.
Perry proceeds to ‘boot up’ an unmodified version of Spore from within the service, with the game running from a remote service and coming through to the screen visibly rapidly. Perry then slips out of Spore and jumps straight into an emulated game of Mario Kart 64.
Crucially, Perry says that the service “mostly” requires under one megabit bandwidth to get running, as seen in the video. He says that the service can run with Wifi and on “netbooks with no 3D card”.
There’s still no mention of how much the service will cost for publishers, developers and consumers.
Naturally, the video was unable to demonstrate how fast the game could respond to control inputs. “We are not in competition with any other streaming company or technology,” said Perry, “our business model is entirely different.”
“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.”
Perry will be explaining more about the service during the upcoming Develop conference.
Watch the video below, and to read Perry’s own detailed description of the service, go here.
Gaikai Technology Demo (JULY 1, 2009) from David Perry on Vimeo.
