Gaikai chase casual audience
Perry looks beyond the hardcore
Veteran game maker Dave Perry recently showed off Gaikai running in real-time to some acclaim, the new cloud computing service shown operating in a web browser, running a number of well known games, and even Photoshop.
Still, while Gaikai should be capable of running fairly recent titles, Perry insists that his new service is going after a different audience - the illusive casual market.
"Gaikai is not built for hardcore gamers - those are the guys that want HD, 60 frames per second, who are happy to sit for an hour and a half, download and install it... that's just not our audience at all - it's trying to reach out to new players, the hundreds of millions of people who never touched Mario Kart but would like to," Perry told GI.biz.
"They dont know it yet, but when they click - they're clicking on games on Facebook, on their iPhone, on MySpace, on Flash games sites - and they haven't experienced games like EVE Online, or Spore, or LEGO Star Wars. They haven't bought a console yet, they're not there yet.
"So that's the audience we're going after initially - and it's a very different approach."
Perry says that Gaikai should launch in early 2010. We're intrigued.
