Castle: Gaikai, OnLive not yet 'appropriate for all games'

InstantAction CEO Louis Castle has expressed concern that cloud gaming technologies such as OnLive and Gaikai may be too ambitious for current broadband audiences.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz in an interview published today, he felt that " Gaikai and OnLive are great technologies, but it's going to be a while before they're a good experience for everybody.

"It'll certainly be a long time, if ever, that they're appropriate for all games."

Castle claimed that InstantAction's Guitar Hero-inspired Facebook game, InstantJam, used a minimum of data and thus was a more realistic option for contemporary internet connections.

"I've shown this demo on netbooks, over 3G. That's not coming any time soon on these other platforms.

The Westwood co-founder disputed assertions that broadband speeds were ready for ambitious new platforms.

"I think that the idea that the network speeds are going up all the time and latency is going down... that's true on average, but the actual latency is getting worse and worse because there's more and more people online.

"Eventually, way down the road, everybody will have ubiquitous high speed connections and that's great. We're happy too, we just want to deliver our games to our customers."

For the full interview with Louis Castle, in which he also discusses InstantAction's delayed plans to distribute triple-A titles, the music industry's response to the option to play almost any song in InstantJam and the collapse of the music game peripheral market, please click here.