Gaikai: Almost all major publishers on board

In an exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Gaikai CEO David Perry has revealed that the cloud gaming company has signed up the majority of video game publishers.

While the company has inked a deal with retail giant Walmart and is in talks with other online stores, it has only revealed two publishing partners publicly - Electronic Arts and Capcom.

"I would say almost all of the major publishers are actually in contracts with us right now, so we're making very good progress with them," he revealed.

"It's a strange situation, it's kind of surprising but the only way you can place your video game on your own website is through us, there's no other way to do it."

The interest is keeping the Gaikai team busy. "We have three different attorney firms working for us just on agreements right now."

He also revealed that Gaikai had a new, super-speedy digital download technology currently in closed beta, for those users that are unable to make use of cloud gaming due to slow internet connections.

It's a strange situation, but the only way you can place your videogame on your own website is through us.

David Perry, Gaikai

"The concept there is just insanely fast downloads from your browser, your web browser delivering games to the user," Perry explained.

"We did that for two reasons. One is that we wanted to be able to let everybody play, and number two is if somebody decides to buy the game or download the MMO, we have to have the fastest way to get it to them. And that's what we've built."

When asked if he thought the service was a threat to consoles, Perry said that single-function hardware is more likely threatened by companies like Apple, which iterate technology at a very rapid rate.

"We don't think we're a threat to console. I think the threat to consoles is actually Apple. I think the concern there is that they're generating hardware so quickly now."

"If you're creating and shipping new hardware every 12 months, and during that 12 months you're also giving pretty impressive upgrades, the features that people want, and you’re giving them those every 6 months and hardware every 12 months, I think the idea that you would have five to seven years on hardware refreshes is becoming a technical problem."

He also saw handhelds as facing a murky future thanks to the introduction of smartphones.

"They really need to be that sort of multifunction device to survive. And if you think about it, that ultimately turns them into cellphones. So I don't think cloud gaming is their problem."

"When you talk to younger kids today, most of them don't have wristwatches, and the reason is they only do one thing. And they don't want to carry anything that just does one thing. They carry their phone and it does everything. And so if you make single function devices, then you've got a problem."

David Perry is CEO and co-founder at Gaikai, and will be speaking at the Cloud Gaming USA in September.