Gaikai's David Perry

We've certainly been having discussions on it. I think we will at some point make a Gaikai controller ourselves. Because I have my own ideas for what a controller needs to be. I've been collecting controllers to demonstrate my point on what needs to be done. I've been starting to look into how that can be made at a sensible price as it's quite a complex device, so we'll see. But for the minute our plan is to support as many things as can be plugged in or go through Bluetooth. Whatever your favourite controller is. If it's an Xbox controller, plug it in. It works on Gaikai today.

We are a company doing this for other people. We are not doing this for ourselves. So our goal is to serve them and deliver this kind of experience. If this was just Gaikai and Gaikai has down time that's our problem. But if I'm doing it for Electronic Arts or someone else and it's down, then it's my problem big-time and everyone's going to be calling. "What the hell? Your network's down!" So advertising to us seemed like the best way to get started. If your ads go down for a certain part of the day it's not as big a deal. It's our problem. Of course internally we'd be dealing with it. But if you just paid to play a game and you log in and it's not available for any reason you're going to get mad.

We worked out this strategy where we'd have two phases. The first would be all advertising and the second would be full games. We expected one to come after the other, but not quite this quickly so we're at a point now where the conversions that we're seeing on the partner sites are way higher than expected so now we want to go to full games. The problem with that is I need to offer Amazon-level "always up" service time.

We built a company like Verizon that doesn't take ownership of anything you're doing on the network.

That's the thing with cloud gaming. It starts off such a simple idea; you're getting data from the cloud. But its all this other stuff: running data centers, making sure everything works all the time... All these different services running together. So we're having humans testing it right now, but you can't do 99.5 per cent with humans. So we have to write all kinds of different test harnesses to make sure every single part of the system is tested using code and not with people. And these are the kinds of things we're dealing with right now. So from now through November is really just all a lot of engineering to do a lot of beta testing.

If I built Gaikai as a company where we owned your customers, and your analytics, and a bunch of your revenue, I can be certain that within 18 months you'd call me up and say, "I just came out of a board meeting and we decided we needed to own our customers for digital going forward and we need all the data we own. We really don't want to be paying any more revenue to an external company, so we're pulling out." That would be what would happen if I went down that path.

We built a company like Verizon that doesn't take ownership of anything you're doing on the network. It's a bit like Amazon. I look at Amazon more as a competitor than anything else because they are supplying GPU capacity from one data center. I have 24. And so that's what we're doing. So as a company the money we generate is based on uses worldwide of cloud gaming.

If you think about it everyone is aligned. Our goal is for people to do it and have a great experience and come back for more. Our biggest epiphany is the quality of the service is more important than anything else and that's partially why we're going to switch from human testing to doing everything with software.

I can say this safely as a developer. As a developer you care so much about your product that it's got to just rock. The latency has to be as low as it can possibly be. The game has to run as fast as it possibly can, and it has to look as good as possible. And that is the service that we're building. It's expensive to do and we're investing very heavily in the infrastructure to make that possible and the net result will be very pro developer and at the end of the day those are the people who we have to make very happy.