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Dave Perry showcases Gaikai, his competitor to Onlive

By on July 1, 2009

The battle to be the provider of core games via a web browser is heating up.

Dave Perry has just released a 10 minute video that claims to show Gaikai working in a browser using standard home computing equipment.

It’s a big claim. Dave says:

  • We designed this for the real internet. The codecs change based on the need of the application, and based on the hardware you have.
  • No installing anything. (I’m running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)
  • We don’t claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn’t take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips.
  • Our bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games.

It’s a pretty impressive demo, although obviously it’s only a video. But if you can play Spore, Eve Online, World of Warcraft or Need for Speed on a “little junky netbook”, that’s very exciting (and massively threatening to existing console manufacturers.)

I’m not qualified to say whether Gaikai is going to work, or whether it’s better than OnLive.What I certainly believe is that we are moving rapidly towards a much more accessible and open gaming market.

Which can only be good for consumers.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com