Perry: TV manufacturers "are all hungry for games"

TV manufacturers are desperate to serve customers gaming channels with high-end videogames, as they look to take advantage of a market where customers expect all screens to offer identical content.

That's according to Gaikai CEO David Perry, who revealed last night that behind closed doors the streaming games service has been running demonstrations of World of Warcraft across multiple connected devices including home consoles and mobile, highlighting the cross-platform advantages of the technology.

"Where you put you screens in the most important thing. Every single television manufacturer is putting in an Ethernet socket on their TV. Make no mistake, they are all hungry for games... to put out a digital channel of high-quality games," said Perry, speaking at the London Games Conference last night.

"They're not prepared to put CDs in boxes, they are not prepared to put six core Intel CPUs with Nvidia 3D cards in every television. Which means the only possible way of doing this is to create the content elsewhere unless they want to advertise Peggle on their TV, which none of them want to do. They want to show Call of Duty, they want to show World of Warcraft. The fact is this isn't very far away, this is actually possible today.

"We've shown live demonstrations of World of Warcraft being played across Xbox 360, Facebook, iPad, notebooks, all playing together against each other streamed from servers."

Perry argued that customers expect their entertainment on demand and in any location, and with streaming technology developers can make one version of a game and take advantage of the reach to multiple hardware.

"This ubiquity is something that's very compatible with game developers - you make your game once and it is where ever you go. It would be great like Netflix, you pause your movie, go upstairs and continue elsewhere," he offered. "That's actually technically possible now."

"Put the consumer first, that's actually compatible with their lifestyle today. If we're going to try and sell them boxes they have to install on different devices and keep everything up to date, it's not putting them first."

He added that publishers using delivery services such Steam are giving their customers away to another company, a mistake in a market that offers multiple choice for consumers.

"There's some pretty scary conversations I've been having with publishers, they'll say to me 'we'll give all our customers to Steam because they make it easy for us'. Your digital future - you've giving it to Steam because that's easy for you to do? It is shocking.

"If it's a digital future you better own your digital customers and be really, really good at taking care of them because it's awfully easy for them to move elsewhere. As they went from MySpace, when they move, they move together, it's a network effect."