Gaikai deal with Sony "opens a lot of doors" says David Perry
Perry believes publishers will be very pleasantly surprised by benefits of Gaikai sale to Sony
Sony's buyout of Gaikai is a strong indicator that major publishers and manufacturers are taking a vested interest in the potential for cloud gaming. Gaikai creator David Perry believes that this is a very good thing, saying that the move "opens a lot of doors that weren't there before" for many in the industry.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Perry says "It's going to make the publishers very happy, because the publishers like PC, but they love console. The message I kept getting back was, PC is cool, but I wish you could do this with console. That's the real meat in our business. That would be really good."
"Of course, we had to go, look at this new PC stuff we have. We had to keep avoiding the console question. It's a very difficult question. If you look at the P&Ls of the publishers, that's such an important piece of their business. We were like, don't look over there. Focus on the PC. But the console question never went away. I had a major publisher recently say to me: 'David, just to be clear, the iPhone is interesting to us. Not as interesting as console. PC? Not as interesting as console. Just to be clear.'
"The second thing they said was, if we're going to put our biggest games on your service, I've got to know you're going to have the financial muscle to support it. When you're a start-up, it's harder to answer that question. But when you've got Sony behind you, it's very easy to answer that question. There are multiple things that have been solved in a single deal. It's quite surprising."
The new deal with Sony is going to help things along tremendously for Gaikai; solving problems relating to the console issue have been cleared up, as well as the controller issue at hand for the service. Perry now says he has to think differently about what he and the team are going to do moving forward.
"We were doing it the way you do it if you're a VC. I have to start thinking differently now because I have one of the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world in our corner. So you have to think differently.
"It's going to open a lot of doors that just weren't open before."