The cloud games industry is one that is growing amongst gamers everywhere, giving them the ability to play their favorite games without ever having to purchase it or even download it. By using data centres with the stored information and giving you access to them you can ?stream? a game and play it seamlessly from your local PC. Cloud gaming includes companies such as; Steam, Direct2Drive, Origin and Gaikai.
Gaikai’s company founder David Perry has said in an exclusive interview with Gamasutra that the company is working behind the scenes as well. They have built a new download technology calling it Gaikai Cloud Delivery that will allow users to play games during download making it much faster the any other cloud gaming service available. David said ?The goal is to try to not let you leave your machine while a game demo or trial is downloading?. He says his new technology will remove some of the issues that steer people away from large downloads and game sign ups. Perry says that alot of gamers will now start a download and walk away from their computer to go to bed or do another activity. Resulting in loss of interest and when they return to the PC they often will head off to do something else.
The concept was described by Perry when he said, ?Basically, what it’s doing is that we start off with the concept that nobody plays games in a linear fashion anymore.? The game can be played within a few minutes and will download as you play through. The hope is that this will decline the time people have to spend away from the computer waiting for the game and so increase the amount of people who will use Gaikai’s services. The program will only become smarter as Perry described it, ?We set a whole team of people on research to try to work out how to do it crowdsourced, so we’d be automatically learning from the players all the time.?
The new product will hopefully be made available on consoles as long as the developers of the console allow for this. Perry shared his thoughts in saying, ?My expectation is that games are just going to get bigger — you even see that on Flash right now,? . Also stating, ?When you see games coming out that are 28 GB like Star Wars: The Old Republic , and currently the only option is to download the whole thing, it’s not very practical, all of a sudden.? This technology will not be a replacement to the current cloud technology only available as an addition to increase the speed at which you can play your downloads and increase the over all downloading times. It will not only be available for Gaikai but for anyone who wants to use it in there engines, for a small fee of course.
We will have to stick around until the technology is made available to truly test the capabilities of this new tech.