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Comments: 121 +- Hardware: GaiKai Beta To Start In Europe "Later This Month" on Thursday September 10, @05:20AM
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Alison Beasley sends word that GaiKai, the cloud gaming service being developed by games industry vet Dave Perry, is about to begin beta testing in Europe. (Sign-up page.) GaiKai is a competitor to OnLive, which started beta tests of its own recently. IGN got a chance to try out GaiKai for themselves, and they've posted a video showing how it performed. From Perry's announcement:
"Our closed beta has two goals. #1 is to bring our servers to their knees so we can choose the final configuration before we start ordering large quantities of them. (We think we have it worked out, but you can be certain our staff will be swapping cards and testing different processors as each day goes by.) Goal #2 is to test older computers. We've had lots of emails from people describing their computers and 99% of them have ample performance. Remember you don't even need a 3D card to see a 3D game run on our service. I know this is strangely counter to what people expect, but we actually want to get plenty of basic office-grade XP machines testing so we can make sure we can reach the widest audience possible. ... After we choose the hardware configuration in Europe, our next phase will be our USA Nationwide Network Test, that will be using 8 Tier-1 Data Centers, getting hammered by Closed Beta testers. During that process, [we] will be identifying the other data centers we need to include to blanket the USA in a low latency array. Phase 2 of that is Europe, in exactly the same test."
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Casual Gamer (Score:4, Interesting)
I assume this is going to be a subscirption type service? I'd love this if you could also use as a pay-as-you-go type of thing. I'm the sort of gamer who doesn't actually finish many games and only plays very infrequently.
Where are the controllers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Where are the controllers? Keyboard access blows chunks.
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On your desk.
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Is the Gaikai client a Flash app?
Flash has no joypad support. Weird.
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Unless you typed that post by moving a cursor over an on-screen keyboard and hitting an action button to select each letter, I suggest you get the fuck out of here and back to your console.
Come on, the video shows them playing Mario Kart 64. You want an analogue stick to play that.
Hmm... not a good history (Score:3, Funny)
Last time I played cloud games, I got in trouble...
(How was I to know that fog machines set off fire alarms?!) :o
Seriously though... this has potential :)
It looks like it works (Score:3, Informative)
Welcome to the future.
Advantages of this technology
1. No more console wars. The consoles that have already been released are more than adequate to do the job of decoding the video for a game service like this. This means
a. Publishers get virtually bulletproof DRM by releasing games for a service like this, even better than they have with consoles. And it's not "DRM" like we hate on slashdot - they simply don't give you a copy of the game at all.
b. Developers only have to worry about ONE platform again - the multicore PC with a high end graphics card and lots and lots of RAM (that's what the GaiKai data centers will be stocked with). Much easier to develop for than a console - if you run into resource limitations, you can just tell GaiKai that your game needs higher end hardware.
c. No more OS and hardware conflicts that caused problems with PC games in the past. GaiKai can give you a copy of the OS image they put on their machines, and the exact part numbers they put into their hardware.
d. No more problems with users failing to buy an adequate dedicated graphics card, or to configure their PC correctly.
2. Groundbreaking new games are possible. Since GaiKai can guarantee that your game will run on a machine of defined specifications, you could really push the graphics.
3. Games can be sold by the hour of play. You could pay about $.50-$1 an hour and hop from game to game, playing whatever catches your interest. Each publisher would receive a share of the revenue proportional to the exact time you spent playing their game. Publishers would probably make more money overall, and gamers would get to enjoy ALL the games, not just AAA titles.
Disadvantages
1. Latency is unavoidable, and it's going to be a little more than some games on some systems today. In the video, I saw them playing Mario cart, and the gamer wasn't crashing into buildings - so the latency is probably not too bad.
2. A high bandwidth internet connection with guaranteed maximum latency is needed to make this service work. There needs to be quality of service routing by the ISPs to make sure that game packets aren't delayed. For the moment, not everyone has access to connections that fast. I live in a small town, but I have 8 mbps cable which is enough.
3. Compression artifacts mean that even in 5 years when people have 20 mbps connections to the service, the games won't be as sharp as the old days.
4. The Biggest Problem is that you're dependent on centralized services to enjoy a video game. (your ISP AND the service) When the service goes down you can't do anything at all. Even once they iron the bugs out, the annual downtime will probably be more than you've experienced with owning the device the games are played on.
Overall, I think the advantages overwhelmingly outweigh the disadvantages. I think consoles with their crazy hardware architectures are going to die away, relegated to the dustbins of history. In the future, all games will be PC compatible. They'll still release local copies of some games for hardcore gamers to run on their PCs, especially of multiplayer only CD key requiring games (like first person shooters)
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"Overall, I think the advantages overwhelmingly outweigh the disadvantages. I think consoles with their crazy hardware architectures are going to die away, relegated to the dustbins of history. In the future, all games will be PC compatible. They'll still release local copies of some games for hardcore gamers to run on their PCs, especially of multiplayer only CD key requiring games (like first person shooters)"
Boy, I hope you're right. Finally being able to play all those old console games right here on my
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Regarding 1b, Developers only have to worry about ONE platform again - the multicore PC with a high end graphics card and lots and lots of RAM (that's what the GaiKai data centers will be stocked with). Much easier to develop for than a console - if you run into resource limitations, you can just tell GaiKai that your game needs higher end hardware."
It won't work light that. You see, the devs on PC side don't care about resource limitations the way console ones do, not only because PCs can be upgraded, but
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Because if you can't steal a game, then
1. The market prices for games will go down, since EVERYONE is paying for it.
2. Game developers will make more money.
In addition, since you don't have to buy another copy of a game just to have your friend play you multiplayer for an hour, you've eliminated a massive problem with the current model already.
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The market prices for games will go down, since EVERYONE is paying for it.
Wait a second here. That sounds like a monopoly to me... I realize that there are similar products competing for a particular game, but if there is only one way you can get access to the game, and one company controls the access, that's a monopoly.
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Wait a second here. That sounds like a monopoly to me... I realize that there are similar products competing for a particular game, but if there is only one way you can get access to the game, and one company controls the access, that's a monopoly.
You're stretching the definition of monopoly a bit there. Currently the only way you can play Killzone is to buy a copy from Sony and play it on a Sony PS3. Does that mean Sony has a monopoly on Killzone? I suppose so, but it's not something that worries regulators, because Sony does *not* have a monopoly on first person shooting games.
That model is bound to extend to the streaming services. Some titles will be a Gaikai exclusive, some will be an OnLive exclusive, some will be available on both services, an
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I disagree with a lot of this. I'm not saying that cloud gaming is ideal for the consumer, but to say it removes competition from the market is nonsense.
Just because you have the "best" rally game does not mean you can set any price you like. Consumers pay their money and take their choice. Some will pay $15/m for the best of breed rally game. Some will pay $5/m for a game that's not quite as good - last year's version. Meanwhile other developers are busy trying to outdo the current best game.
you can just keep on raising the fees to play until you start losing too many costumers.
Cloud gaming would be the death of fair pricing for computer games.
What you descr
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It costs money to make a new game, therefore supply is NOT endless. Supply of new games is limited by the expected return on investment for developing a game. Raising the revenue of game sellers means that the expected return increases which in turn means that more suppliers will enter the market.
If you go crack open an introductory economics textbook, you'll spot a brief primer on what nearly always happens when you increase suppliers for a good.
Yes, the unique nature of each games means that they are no
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Yes, the unique nature of each games means that they are not totally interchangable, but within a genre the best quality game usually is the one that gets the most sales.
All other things being equal, yes. But price and availability come into play. I wouldn't be surprised if "Cro-Mag Rally" ($1.99 on the iPhone store) sold more units than FUEL.
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I was mostly agreeing with you - a service like this does NOT break competition.
I do wonder whether in terms of profit ($$$ - revenue minus outgoings) a cheap iPhone game would beat a big budget PS3 game.
The point is that you can compete on aspects other than game quality. Price is an important factor. Some people won't spend $60 on the best racing game on the market, and would happily spend $30 on a game with poorer reviews.
I think we're agreeing that there's room in a world of streaming games for healthy
Tell me this. (Score:3, Interesting)
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What makes you think "we" can't make it work on a LAN?
http://streammygame.com/ [streammygame.com] provides is just one piece of software you could try it with.
Re:Tell me this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Won't work. Can't work.
If youtube can't start playing a hd video without buffering first, They won't be able to live stream a game with an acceptable resolution. We're talking instant video-compression and streaming to multiple users without visible lag. The technology allowing this just isn't available anywhere right now.
Parent
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YouTube buffers because it uses codecs that are optimised for situations where a delay is acceptable. You don't need to worry about the distance between your browser and a YouTube server, because the latency doesn't affect your experience once the video has started playing.
Streaming games is different, because latency is important. So:
- different codecs, designed with low latency in mind.
- a focus on locating servers close to clients
Smart people are investing in this. If it was as simple as
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I was nodding my head until you said MJPEG.
MJPEG is literally a JPEG encoded frame, followed by another JPEG encoded frame, etcetera. That's why MJPEG files are so big.
The codecs used to stream video use keyframes and deltas. So you start with a full frame, then for the next frame you transmit as little information as possible, such that the client can approximate the next frame. So that could be as simple as "no change" (for a still image), or "copy the rectangle with these coordinates to these new coordin
Re:Tell me this. (Score:4, Informative)
Heh... I say it can't be done because you have to figure your PEAK bandwidth requirements per customer. The moment you oversell something like this in the manner the ISP's have done their bandwidth you're done- you can get away with probably half again more that the math, if you're lucky. If you can't provide snappy service a good 95% of the time, you're not going to get takers. WoW works as well as it does because it's lower bandwidth than this. Ditto most of the other MMOGs.
If you apply the aforementioned guide to how many they can service, unless you get the ISPs to one and all sign up for this and put it fully on the edge (I can tell you that this will be heinously expensive- there's several reasons why epicRealm failed, one of which was being in 50 data centers worldwide to the tune of a $2mil/mo burn rate- and this was with sweetheart co-lo deals...if you don't have the deals, it'll be more painful than that...), the peak numbers without oversell for OnLive, with their stated maximum bandwidth requirements, would be:
30 subscribers on a T3.
103 subscribers on an OC-3.
414 subscribers on an OC-12.
1658 subscribers on an OC-48.
Now, to put the burn rate for this in perspective:
Average cost of an OC-3 is 20,000 USD/mo.
Average cost of an OC-12 is 200,000 USD/mo.
Average cost of an OC-48 is about $400,000 USD/mo.
This doesn't even get into latency issues- either in the framework itself or over the Internet. Most games do "online" because they compensate for lost traffic, delayed delivery of traffic and so forth. As you fill the pipe, packets will be dropped (UDP) or delayed (TCP) as part of the TCP/IP congestion avoidance algorithms when they kick in (they start doing things to you at about 30% or so of the capacity of the pipe...). With so much bandwidth being used compared to the games we've got today, it's going to be difficult for them to accomplish the return end compensation for these issues. Dropped frames won't cut it here- you'll end up with a jarring experience that's different from lag induced issues that we've all seen with online games.
It works in the low-end numbers tests they're running (and they couldn't be running large numbers tests because of the associated burn-rate supporting more than a couple hundred subscribers...) because they're not tripping over peak values overmuch in the local testing or even the remote testing they're doing with GaiKai and OnLive.
As you can see, my disbelief has less to do with the compression and more due to realities of how the Internet and TCP/IP actually work- and they're going to be broken upon the wheel with this stuff. As for claiming that they're lying- I don't think they're knowingly lying. I think they've missed a few tenets that I've laid out in simplistic terms and they are barking up the wrong tree with a neat "what if we..." line of thought that should have been scotched when they did the aforementioned napkin math I did here in this post.
Parent
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Special software, yes. However it won't work in the large because as you pile more bandwidth on, the worse the latencies get, either because of UDP drops/retransmits or TCP packet delivery delays/retransmits.
The Internet's an unholy mess as far as game networking code is concerned. It might work for hundreds- it won't scale to the levels they need to relegate PC and Console gaming to the dustbin of history anytime soon.
Download limits (Score:2, Insightful)
Streaming videos or games will not work as long as these caps are there. And seeing how my ISP also delivers us video on demand (which doesn't count towards my download limit) I really can't see them eager to change this.
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Streaming videos or games will not work as long as these caps are there. And seeing how my ISP also delivers us video on demand (which doesn't count towards my download limit) I really can't see them eager to change this.
I suspect that services like Gaikai and OnLive will be eager to partner with ISPs - so you won't be too many hops from their servers. In a deal like that, I'd expect the streaming game packets not to count towards the limits. I guess we'll see how it pans out.
Akamai is another company that puts servers at ISP so that they're close to the client. They do it in order to cache web content and make sites feel faster. A lot of ISPs actually pay Akamai to put their servers on their sites, because the biggest cost
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It's not the same model as Akamai- and it's going to be a bit of a hard sell. Single-player games will keep bandwidth local, but choke up their backhauls that're oversold. And this doesn't get into MMOG bandwidth totals as you go multiplayer.
At 1.5 Mbit/s, they will choke a T3 with only 30-60 of their subscribers on the pipe back to the data center for the ISP. Do you honestly think they're using OC-3/OC-12 backhauls from the residential areas without something like U-Verse or FiOS in the neighborhood in
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Do they have competition?
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Mario Kart (Score:2)
One of the most interesting aspects of this is running Mario Kart 64... I doubt Nintendo has licensed a Mario game out, so is this running from a real cart? Via an emulator or real N64? Either way I can't see Nintendo being pleased.
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Don't be silly. If they're allowing the public to play Mario Kart, they're doing it legally, so a license fee is being paid somehow.
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Why would you assume a license fee is being paid? If I owned a video game arcade, and rented out time playing Mario Kart on a N64 by the hour, I would be under no obligation to obtain a license from Nintendo or pay Nintendo any money (in my legal jurisdiction, others may vary). Now if I installed an N64 in a server room, and had a TV and joypad in a different player room, I still would have no license obligation towards Nintendo. This is exactly the same, except the "other room" happens to be hundreds of ki
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Interesting analogy, and you do have a point.
However, pissing off Nintendo would be really stupid. My theory is that either they've cleared it, or that Mario Kart won't be available to the public.
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Heh... I'd not suppose either way. I've seen many a startup go and pull a stupid thing like that in the sake of "cool" and being expeditious about things.
It can go either way on that score.
If you ask me (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Streaming games (Score:4, Interesting)
Two comments on this:
1. Gaikai is going for a model where their servers are widely deployed at the "edge" of the Internet. That means negotiating with ISPs to locate servers near the modems. Part of that deal will involve having sufficient bandwidth for those servers and those protocols.
2. This kind of service is going to build customer demand for stable, fast, low latency connections. Presumably market forces will cause ISPs to provide.
Parent
Re:Streaming games (Score:4, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you ;) As a UK broadband customer (albeit one who doesn't need much bandwidth), I can't see the ISPs offering the kind of levels that people expect in the US and other nations for a hell of a long time yet.
Someone commented on digital downloads recently that it was okay because 4GB was only a "small amount" of your average 30GB+ monthly cap. 30GB+? You're probably talking £30+ per month in the UK on top of your £12 per month phone line charge and some contorted "acceptable use policy", not the entry level £10-£15 that most people use.
Parent
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What the hell are you talking about?
You clearly haven't used Be broadband. No limits. May have a FUP, but mostly aimed at heavy users. 24 Mbit (ADSL, so YMMV) for around 19 quid a month. Get a static IP for an extra pound.
The UK is ahead of the US in terms of broadband.
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That's an ideal eventually, but I don't suppose the ISPs will want to get there in a hurry. As it is they're already complaining that the infrastructure is too old (well invest and update it, then!).
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If this works it will still suck outside of their area of coverage
If you're outside the area of coverage, you probably won't even be allowed to sign up.
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I am on BT in West London, and I get a ping of 15ms to my favourite TF2 server sitting a couple of hops away from Telehouse, so its reasonable that if these guys had a server around there, Latency for London shouldn't be a problem. Reliably supplying the bandwidth, even on their top broadband package (8Mb atm) may be more of a problem.
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OnLive has said that for HD you need 5Mb/s -- but that it *peaks* at that level. That is, most of the time it's using much less.
So, you'll get a choppy experience if your ISP can't deliver 5Mb/s when you need it. But 1 minute's play won't use anywhere near 5*60Mb = 300Mb of your download allowance.
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You forgot a few things in cons:
- less privacy
- dependence over an online service for your enjoyment (which is quite a huge con)
Also I don't see how this helps fight piracy. Are you suggesting only providing games this way, making piracy impossible?
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Also I don't see how this helps fight piracy. Are you suggesting only providing games this way, making piracy impossible?
I think it makes it almost impossible.
I can well imagine a game being released *only* on a streaming platform. The executable game code would never leave the provider's servers.
I can only think of two ways to pirate that game:
- hack the authentication / authorization mechanism in order to play for free
- obtain the game code either through hackery or social engineering
Once you have the game code, it's probably not as easy to install and play as a traditional game for Windows.
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No game customization, modding. This also affects the community around games.
There's not really a technical barrier to this. If there's a consumer demand for moddable games via a streaming service, the game that provides it will succeed in the market.
Examples of ways it could work:
- Fully featured editing tools accessible through the streaming service
- Editing tools to run locally, upload the results to the service where others can play them.
- etc.
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Fairly obviously - you get what they give you.
There's no technical barrier to them offering you addons and mods, so it's the service provider's choice as to whether or not they do.
Likewise rebinding the keyboard layout. That's going to be a feature of the game, not the platform.