David Perry Will Change How You Play Games

“We think we can get more people to play games,” Gaikai Co-founder David Perry said, with all the confidence of a man who’s already seen the future.

And why not? Perry’s certainly seen the past. Founding Shiny Entertainment in 1993, Perry’s responsible for some of the most iconic games – MDK and Earthworm Jim to name a few. Now the seasoned developer heads Gaikai – a service that wants to get games in the hands of more people, including yours.

When it comes to broadening gaming, you may think of the Wii or Farmville – titles that get more people involved but don’t offer the sort of experience you’re looking for. Perry’s goals are different. Imagine Mass Effect 2, World of Warcraft, and FIFA Soccer, from desktop to gameplay, in two clicks and playable in seconds. That’s the idea behind Gaikai.

The Gaikai founders: David Perry, Andrew Gault, Rui Pereira

“Even if they only play for one minute, at least they’ve made a decision.” Perry said.

So just how does Perry plan to get these games in front of all these people? The idea is similar to OnLive in technology, but radically different in implementation.

“I had a big problem that morning [when Onlive announced] because I thought ‘Damn. What do I do? If I don’t announce, then forever we’ll be the copy of OnLive.’ So I announced the same day, but I had no choice. They forced my hand,” Perry said. “We announced and luckily every single decision they made, we went the other way.”

First of all, there is no client application .exe file to download and install, and you won’t have to directly buy any of the games. This is a marketing tool, designed to give you an instantaneous taste of the games you’re interested in.

“We’ve worked out ‘Are you anywhere near one of our servers?’ If you are, then a popup appears. If you’re not close to one of our servers, then nothing happens. The website looks like it’s always looked,” Perry said.

Don’t get turned off by the phrase ‘pop-up.’ In the demo presented to me, an attractive graphic overlay appeared in the lower-right corner of the website, no more intrusive than your common ad banner. However, it offers something no banner can – the ability to click and immediately start playing the full, real game.

“When people fully see what we’re doing, the penny drops. We hear, whoa, hold on a minute, this can change things,’” Perry said.

From there, you have all the freedom to try the product yourself with virtually no investment of time.

“You can decide ‘this game rocks’ and that’s it, we’ve done our piece,” Perry said.

But you may be skeptical that the whole process can really work as described. The demo presented to me showed no cracks, though admittedly I did not try it myself. A demo of Mass Effect 2 spooled up in-browser within seconds, and the demonstrator even dragged the window around the screen just to show off a little.

However, for ye skeptics, here’s a more detailed run-down of the process. According to Perry, there’s no huge secret to the process.

“We do not have a magical compression algorithm. We use all the industry standard compression algorithms. We’ve even gone to an extreme at certain times to switch compression on the fly – you don’t even notice,” Perry said. “If an application needs to be pixel perfect, we use pixel perfect compression mixed with high motion compression, so if you start turning, the whole thing is super smooth because it’s using a fast compression, but then when you stop it’s pixel perfect.”

The real trick as Perry relates – and OnLive neglects – is a wide distribution of servers.

“It’s not magic, it’s just hard logistics work and lots and lots of experimentation and research. The net result is we’ve discovered – probably the biggest discovery we’ve had – is that we put a lot of effort into compression thinking ‘If we can just save one more millisecond…’ We got all carried away with that,” Perry said. “We worked out later that if we move the data centers closer to the users, that has a much more dramatic impact on latency.”

To get even more technical, Perry related some exact numbers from his testing at home. From his house in Southern California, he gets an 8ms round trip to the data center in Los Angeles. It takes a frame of the game 6ms to compress on the server end, and around 6ms to decompress on the client end. Add it all up, and you have about 20ms of lag – well less than most high definition televisions. For reference, I usually have to set Rock Band or DJ Hero to 45ms of lag on my TV.

“We never thought it would happen but we’re done. It’s actually working,” Perry said.  “Just know we are doing the best we can, and will continue to reduce latency over time until it’s just not a discussion topic anymore.  Today we are in 22 data centers and someday will be in hundreds.”

Gaikai builds its network through the feedback it gets from website visitors. If you go to a site and you’re judged too far from a data center, you don’t see anything, but it sends a message back home.

“The message says to us ‘For god’s sake, buy more servers,’” Perry said.

Every visitor turned away is a potential sale lost. From there it’s easy to make the case to investors – Gaikai lost exactly this many views because they don’t have a data center in X city. Once Gaikai places a data center, they can then generate a map of latency in the area.

“It’s a case of reverse engineering the internet, there’s no point in guessing,” Perry said. “We put a data center in and see what coverage it paints green on our latency map.”

Some densely urban areas like Japan are easy to cover, while more spread-out areas like Australia will require more centers. Either way, Gaikai is committed to covering the globe with coverage, because remember – if latency is judged to be too high, the game is never offered.

The immediate effect to you as a gamer is substantial – with Gaikai you can try out games in full without lengthy downloads or installations. That’s important, because games are becoming harder and harder to judge from a distance. To drive this point, Perry showed me a picture of a brand-new line of chainsaws. Yep, chainsaws.

Can YOU find the best chainsaw?

“It’s a sign of what’s happening in the games industry, in my opinion. This is what happens when a genre turns mature; they start to look the same. Chainsaw companies have given up to some extent – they’re just making the same thing over and over again, which changes how you buy products,” Perry said. “When things start to look the same, then you have to start buying based on features. Now you’re feature shopping, and you can’t tell from a glance which is the best. You have to start looking in to it to make the right decision.”

To make matters worse – especially from a marketing perspective – gamers are becoming increasingly resilient to traditional marketing methods.

“Gamers are savvier than ever before. They don’t trust trailers at all, and they go to YouTube to watch somebody, some kid, play on YouTube and make the buy decision there,” Perry said. “They want to see what they’re about to buy, they don’t want to see the marketing version of it. That’s the real world of buying video games today. YouTube is getting hammered with people watching gameplay videos.”

Farm…town?

Another contributor to the problem is that developers are way less hesitant about copying wholesale, making titles appear more homogeneous.  ”People are a lot less apologetic about copying,” Perry said. “You used to feel kind of bad about it when you ripped somebody off, but now days, you’ll have 5-10 teams trying to clone your game in the next 3-4 weeks if they possibly can. They’re all over you like a rash. If you look at all the Farmville clones now it’s embarrassing.”

A service like Gaikai, should it work as advertised, will give gamers a better edge to make more fitting decisions with their money.

“If we could make it so you could click on each of these soccer games and play them instantly, then we’re giving you a really easy way to only pay for games you love,” Perry said. “You know how hard it would be to try all of these games today?”

Of course, that ease of use has obvious implications.

“We can’t help sell bad games,” Perry said. “If we help you play a bad game, you know it’s a bad game.”

Because of this, Perry has no interest in carrying or offering tons of random games.

“We’re not going to turn into Gametap and have a thousand games. We’re not remotely interested in it,” Perry said. “We’re going to have a small amount of titles. I’m happy if I can get five hit-it-out-of-the-park titles.”

Perry plans that this will develop a level of prestige for the service.

“I want the gamer to learn that when a pop-up appears from us, it’s worth a click. There’s no question this is worth a click. You’d be crazy not to click,” Perry said.

Pick by looking – hard. Pick by playing – easy.

Gaikai plans to be irresistible to both websites and advertisers alike as well. By sharing half of their revenue with the websites that carry Gaikai, the service offers far more generous revenue potential than traditional banners. Additionally, every minute played through a website portal directly correlates to money made – $0.01 per minute per player if the website directly represents the game (targeting publisher game sites like worldofwarcraft.com or EA.com) and $0.02 per minute for third-party sites (targeting high traffic affiliate sites like machinima.com or MMORPG.com).

“You get paid for every single minute anyone plays anything on your site,” Perry said. “We don’t impact any of the money you currently make; we just add a new revenue line that never existed before.”

And for advertisers, they get the guarantee that every single penny they pay to Gaikai means direct exposure to a potential customer.

“Would you like a million people to play your game in the next sixty minutes? Would you like that to happen? Would that help you out?” Perry asked, imitating near-rhetorical questions asked to a publisher.

This is clearly a better option than more fuzzy advertising methods like banner ads or billboards. Gaikai can also get a little sneaky about where they place their offers.

“You’re saying to the publisher ‘Someone in New York right now is staring at your BUY button, and by the way they haven’t clicked it. Do you want to interact with them before they leave the page?’” Perry said. “There’s one better one than that, which is ‘Someone’s staring at your competitor’s product right now and they haven’t clicked buy yet. Do you want to interact with them?’”

So that’s Gaikai from all three perspectives – the gamers, the websites running the ads, and the publishers buying the ads. From every angle, Gaikai promises something new, better, easier, and more efficient. From the sounds of it, this is the next step towards the hard media-less society we seem to be inevitably marching towards. Although, by Perry’s reckoning, that society isn’t so far off.

“Aren’t we there already? Games release through the internet, you download your TV shows, you buy your music. Entire countries like China and Korea are running entirely off of PC download server-connected games,” Perry said. “I think we’re farther along than people give it credit.”

“My dream would be that we are powering all game experiences from the first touch to the delivery of the game worldwide through our partners. If we do that, you can see why we don’t mind publishers owning the customers. We don’t need to have the customer,” Perry said. “Think of us like an AT&T selling network minutes to publishers. It’s a pretty great place to be.”

And his vision of the future of gaming doesn’t stop there.

“Same thing for digital televisions, set top boxes, and all mobile devices, anything with a screen,” Perry said. “My ultimate goal would be true ubiquity. You buy a game one time from a publisher one time from a publisher and you own it. Everywhere you go, on your mobile devices in your airplane seats and your hotel room, everywhere you go, if there’s Gaikai service powering it, you can continue where you left off. It’s your game.”

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