OnLive's announcement of a ground-breaking video-on-demand service has become the buzz of the game industry this week at GamesBeat 09 and the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. But it has also shaken loose a competitor.
David Perry, chief creative officer at Acclaim and an active game entrepreneur, said he has a new company dubbed Gaikai that's trying to do the same thing as OnLive but without some of its drawbacks.
"I was going to reveal it at [the E3 trade show], but the OnLive news has forced my hand," said Perry, whose new project is not associated with Acclaim.
OnLive has a big head start. Entrepreneur Steve Perlman started it more than seven years ago and now has working demos of a service that enables server-based game play, where the game computing happens on a central server and game images are sent instantaneously to the gamer's display. The technology speeds the flow of data so much that Perlman said high-end games can play on low-end hardware. A lot of executives I talked to in the past day are skeptical that Perlman can pull it off, but all agree it could be a huge disruptive force if it works, enabling digital distribution of games that bypasses retail. Perlman has deals with a bunch of publishers who are showing 16 working games at the GDC. He has raised money from Maverick Capital, Warner Bros., and Autodesk.
Perry said that while Perlman's solution requires a small megabyte-size download, his company can do it without any downloads to a client machine. He said he can get it working on any machine with a broadband connection.
Perry, by the way, recently railed against GameStop, the largest retailer of games, for selling used games without giving a cut to publishers or developers, so it makes sense he'd be working on a solution. His company is small, with just a couple of Dutch technologists and Perry himself. Perry said he has filed for patents. He plans on raising a round of venture money and hiring more programmers. He said his company will need to strike a deal with a major internet service provider that can help create a video-games-on-demand service around the technology.