Gaikai’s President David Perry announced that they will be offering demos of PC games on Facebook. The deal has already been met with Facebook to go along with the similar deals Gaikai has with showing high quality games from EA on Best Buy’s website.
“Our next big launch is on Facebook and we’ve been working with them for some time, Facebook already owns the category of casual gaming, we’re going to help them own core games.”
-David Perry
Perry recently demoed World of Warcraft on the Social network. There plan is to help Facebook reach out to the hardcore gamers that are out there while introducing the games to newer users. Gaikai had actually been showing how some of the PC games run within Facebook at this past year’s E3. The idea is to not move the gamer to the game, but the game to the Gamer.
The Goal of Gaikai
Gakai plans to have up to 10 million Monthly Active Users(MAU) Through its affiliates program (which can be found here at n00balert in the months to come.) Other sites that are planning to be affiliates include Eurogamer.net and possibly IGN. The idea of the affiliate program is to raise popularity of PC games by scaling gaming in different formats.
Gaikai has expected to be serving games on web-enabled TVs next year. This may open up an additional 75 million users to the market. Yet all of this is in the works as negotiations with Intel and many TV makers continue.
Exposing Gaming Companies
Gaikai is raising the bar for publishers by streaming the gaming service to anyone with a decent internet connection. By doing this, Gaikai is creating another new way for users to enjoy gaming while introducing others to it for the first time. Untapped markets such as these
Our first target is to get ten million monthly uniques that we can push these game experiences out to as a way to help the publishers and the online retailers address more audience,”
-Nanea Reeves, chief strategy officer at Gaikai
With the introduction of cloud gaming, the risk of taking some of the gaming market from consoles is very real. With the trends that many companies are seeing in the market, its very relevant that the next PS4 could be nothing but a mere media device. This device would perhaps just access into a VPN and run on a private server for PSN users only.
Buying expensive consoles may be a thing of the past. A simple media device can cost way less to make and is easier to mass produce so that it can fulfill its demand basis. Eliminating expensive hardware and software expenses for the company is more key when you can monetize more money by adding extra features and downloads. Xbox and Playstation both make more money on DLC’s that go along with games than they do with the game themselves. Probably a trend not likely to stop any time soon.
via Games Industry
