Gaikai Open Beta

I’ve been insanely busy recently. Today I was at the Intel CEO Summit, it was an amazing collection of people and fantastic speeches by the CEO of Intel, the CEO of Best Buy (180,000 employees) and the Prime Minister (when I used to live in England) – John Major. (In England the Prime Minister is kinda like the President in the USA but without the cool toys like Air Force One, The White House etc.)
Anyway, on Sunday afternoon we decided to stop coming up with excuses not to launch Gaikai to the public and silently sent out a blast of 1,000 invites around the world. Suddenly we were officially “Open Beta”, people were playing within minutes and leaving nice messages in our survey system.

“The Audio was fantastic, and was spot on – no lag which really impressed me. The control responsiveness was also very good! I did not expect it to be so fluid/smooth but I definitely felt like I was playing this game locally.”
“It was incredibly smooth. Way better than any experience i’ve ever had with onlive, and i was on wifi!”
“Just amazing , I’m a Linux user , i love enjoy my game under my OS. I really want use Gaikai it’s really the new way for play without Windows , thank you make my day .”
“I loved being able to play inside my browser! I also liked being able to take control of the mouse when I wanted.”
“The resolution was similar to the OnLive service but the responsiveness seemed much much better”
“The streaming was perfect”

We sent out another 10,000 invites and players are currently hitting 15 of our 24 data centers.
No issues have been reported that we can’t fix this month, and so we will continue to send out invite blasts in waves of 10,000 until all issues are fixed.
The game everyone is playing first is Mass Effect 2, it’s the highest rated PC game in the last 12 months and Bioware simply rocks. They’ve been very supportive as has Electronic Arts. The good news for them is we are getting a surprising amount of people clicking “BUY” without even making them a special offer.
We are working with lots of publishers / retailers / media sites / electronics makers / telecom companies etc. We have at least 60 deals in the pipe at some stage. (You can imagine how nuts that is to manage.)
Our team has been growing nicely and we have been making some strategic hires that you will hear about in the next few weeks.
The Second Life team (from Linden Lab) has also been working away on a special build that they wanted to stream with no friction. They sent out a tweet and people started hitting the servers, it worked well. They posted to Facebook and now are inviting directly with emails (I just got one.) So that traffic is keeping our servers busy too.
Anyway, if you’d like to try Gaikai, just register at the bottom of the page on http://www.gaikai.com.
Everyone will be getting invited in batches and if you are too far from our servers, don’t worry you’ve actually helped as you’ve shown us where we need to install more data centers. (We’re effectively reverse-engineering the internet, letting the traffic show us where the best data center position would give access to the most people.)
It’s fun to see people posting videos, here’s one of Mass Effect 2 streamed to Linux.

Here’s someone trying Second Life without having to install it.

The next 90 days will be very exciting, I’m also going to be talking about Server v2.0 soon. (Three years of building this tech all refined into a stunning new configuration that our developers should be incredibly proud of.)
dp