Gaikai ("Open Cloud Gaming Platform")

[PeteJ]

Games you can play in your browser without downloading anything. I just played Mass Effect 2. Pretty impressive stuff and in my view works a lot better than OnLive.

http://www.gaikai.com/

Still in Beta but they've put up a few demos you can try, just follow these links:
Mass Effect 2: http://www.beta.gaikai.com/games/mass-effect-2
Dragon Age 2: http://www.gaikai.com/games/dragon-age-2
Dead Space 2: http://www.beta.gaikai.com/games/dead-space-2
The Sims 3: http://www.thesims3.com/trial
Spore: http://www.beta.gaikai.com/beta/spor...97H27HjyD03013
Battlefield: Bad Company 2: http://www.beta.gaikai.com/beta/bf_b...97H27HjyD03013

No need to sign up.

Press Shift + Escape to get your mouse back, along the top there is a button to make it full screen.

ME2 worked flawlessly for me, not sure if it's full detail or not but it looked pretty good to me though obviously not particularly high res (not seen the PC version before). Input was surprisingly responsive. Running on a 20meg ADSL.

Maybe the future of gaming, almost certainly the future of demoing your game.

[abigsmurf]

Gotta say, I'm really impressed.

The video compression dulls the visuals slightly (colours are a bit muted) but it's still sharp and the input lag is comparable to an unoptimised home AV setup. Played Dead Space 2 for a bit with no problems at all.

[charlesr]

Where are their servers? Because onlive is still US only I think, thus their service being a bit laggy.

[cavalcade]

2 Meg ADSL in France says no.

[Spatial]

Can't get anything to work. Keeps telling me Java is missing for some reason (it isn't)

[Silvergun X]

Ended up playing through the entirety of the Mass Effect 2 demo on here to try it out.

My initial impressions compared to OnLive are that the video quality looks a lot more compressed on Gaikai, but the controls are a LOT more responsive. As Charles said, OnLive is currently US servers only which could be a big reason behind that, so when that gets launched in UK and Europe, I'd love to see the comparison.

[Digfox]

Very impressed, although sound kept cutting out (either on Chrome or Safari; OSX).

Used this link to install Java on OS X 10.7 btw:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Java#On_Mac_OS_X

[Hohum]

It's not perfect, but I find it impressive that it even works at all... let alone this well. Can certainly see tech like this becoming widely adopted some years down the line.

[wakka]

Haven't been able to try it yet, but from what people are saying...this has to be the future, doesn't it? Once home bandwidth reaches the 100mb+ region (or even the insane 1.5Gb speeds Virgin are trialling in London) and games can be streamed smoothly in 1080p, it sort of seems like why would they even bother to sell us game systems that are horrendously costly to design, develop and manufacture? It's a general consensus that the future of game sales and delivery lies in DLC, but I think this type of technology will actually supersede that before it gets the chance to take over from traditional retail channels.

Of course there's the issue that both Microsoft and Sony are fighting for control of living room media in general, but there's still the possibility of vastly lower-cost machines that are capable of the media consumption capabilities that the 360 and PS3 are capable of now, but rely on streaming for actually playing games.

[Matt]

Looking ahead, the issue with cloud gaming isn't bandwidth, as that will keep on increasing. The problem is latency. There are physical limitations that you simply can't overcome through technology. You already get control latency in games, some more than others, that you can overcome to an extent through higher framerates. But once that Shoot command has to be sent to a Cloud elsewhere, then processed, before being beamed back to you for decoding and display, it's a real issue.

Some games will suffer because of this - twitch games, FPS, that kind of stuff. Others, it shouldn't make much difference, and it seems to me people may not even notice. We had a discussion here a few years back where certain elements didn't believe me when I was explaining about input latency (thankfully Digital Foundry has since appeared and made it clearer than I did). But if people didn't notice that, maybe they won't notice the increased latency of cloud gaming. Or maybe we'll all grow to accomodate it in our playing styles.

Of course, we already have a delay when you Shoot in most online titles (shotgun in Gears being a regular example I give), but then the client (ie your Xbox) is doing client side movement prediction so you're running around smooth as silk (as long as you don't get dropped packets / lag). So we're accustomed to a delay in shooting / hitting the enemy, but not in movement which I think is more difficult to accomodate.

The best solutions I can think of for reducing latency would be cloud servers in every major city, and also running the games at some obscene framerate. I think, in theory, a monster framerate would counter some, maybe all, of the Cloud latency.

Because if a 30fps game has an average input latency of 133ms, if you run the game at 300fps that will drop to 13ms. Add in client->server->encoding->client->decoding time of say 100ms, it would be even better. Of course, getting a cloud server room with enough power to run say 10,000 instances at a time, at 300fps of the latest high end game may be asking too much, lol

There's still a long way to go for the codecs though, but yes increased bandwidth will really improve image quality.

[charlesr]

I think it's like mp3 - the masses are happy to accept lower quality (sound) for increased convenience (tiny file size on tiny devices).
Most people will end up with the streamed version, but the hardcore will still want the local version (think CD/FLAC vs MP3).

[Matt]

You could be right. If so, then the future will be entirely PC based as the home console-owning market will shrink considerably.

I'm still not sold on this. I know a lot of people are excited about, and I can see why. The convenience factor is huge.

[Flabio]

Services like this will live or die on their content, so it'll be the deals done with studios more than anything else that determines if this suceeds.

[EvilBoris]

You'll also open up a new set of development issues, it's all very well being able to run this on a tablet, but how's that going to work without a keyboard or mouse (presuming they are just running the PC version)

[wakka]

You could be right. If so, then the future will be entirely PC based as the home console-owning market will shrink considerably.

I see this as expanding beyond PC though. What will really make this work will be if it's taken up Microsoft, Sony or (unlikely considering their sluggishness to embrace online technology) Nintendo. Perhaps initially built into the next generation systems but if it was really popular we could see low-cost OnLive style boxes produced to play on the TV with all the peripheral compatibility etc that is expected. Then you run into issues with something like Kinect, which needs a significant amount of local processing power, but still...

PC will be the test bed for this, no doubt, but I see no reason why it couldn't expand to consoles. And if it did, the content deals that Flabio pointed out are so key wouldn't be nearly so much of an issue. Sony or MS could make it mandatory to have the game available for streaming if they wanted to.