David Perry - Part One

Gaikai is not built for hardcore gamers - those are the guys that want HD, 60 frames per second, who are happy to sit for an hour and a half, download and install it... that's just not our audience at all - it's trying to reach out to new players, the hundreds of millions of people who never touched Mario Kart but would like to. They don't know it yet, but when they click - they're clicking on games on Facebook, on their iPhone, on MySpace, on Flash games sites - and they haven't experienced games like EVE Online, or Spore, or LEGO Star Wars. They haven't bought a console yet, they're not there yet.

So that's the audience we're going after initially - and it's a very different approach. To them it will be shocking: "Good God, what the Hell is this?" And that's the experience we want people to have.

Absolutely - ultimately, if we can grow an audience, at the end of the day that extra audience brings value to the game. So if a company puts their game out and we can double that audience because of extending that reach into places they couldn't reach, that's more revenue for the company, and hopefully they'll invest more into the game, or future games - that's really a good thing for everybody?

It's simple - very easy. Think of it as us selling new players. Imagine you're a game company and you're developing a game, and you really want to get it out there. You have a choice of putting banners all over the internet, hoping that people see those banners and feel they need to buy the game, then go and download it.

Or you can come to us, and for a cost - and we don't know what that cost will be yet because it'll be market-driven... whatever the market's willing to pay will be the cost, for the publisher to get that player to pay. My goal is for the publisher to pay, not the gamer. That's the most important part here - that's a game-changer.

I'm a big fan of free-to-play - I'm the chief creative officer of Acclaim, and I care greatly about how to get people into games on a mass scale, and then convert them once we've got them. I just wrote an article on EA about how they're committed to Free with Battlefield Heroes, Sony's doing great with FreeRealms - there's no question that works. If you can get them to come in and give it a whirl...

I just think it's a game-changer - say you're reading a preview of a game that's about to come out, and the preview is written from the point of view of knowing the person is about to play it while reading the preview. On that window, you design your page so you've got the preview and the game is playing right there. They can click and actually experience the real game - it's pretty cool because it's not the idea of making a portal and trying to get everyone to come to it, but letting the publishers say to a certain website, "Hey, why don't we work together?"

Because everybody you get to play the game, you just saved the publisher money. There's a real synergy there - it's not like they had to pay for every banner to get every single click, you just drove your traffic into their game.

So they'll give you the game for a certain period of time, and they'll have to cover the cost of the servers while people play - and that's what we charge them. If they use one minute of our service, we'll charge them for one minute. If they play for an hour, we charge for an hour - they set how long people can play for, and ultimately they either try to convert them... go to the store and buy the game, download and buy the game... or continue playing - keep streaming, keep playing.