David Perry of Earthworm Jim fame and now CEO and co-founder of Gaikai teased fans with a photo of World of Warcraft on iPad.
Cloud computing is an innovative technology fanfared to be the future of gaming online. There are other contenders trying to get a piece of the Cloud pie such as OnLive and OTOY, but Gaikai is heading in a different direction by licensing the technology directly to game developers, enabling publishers to stream the games themselves from their own servers.
Could you imagine what Blizzard could do with Cloud technology on Battle.net 2.0: World of Warcraft, Diablo III, Next-Gen MMO and future games?
The technology potentially eliminates the need to have a top notch graphic card and water-cooling rig, The publisher hosts a copy of the game and streams it to you via your internet browser without any need to install plugins nor download any file. All that is done by the publisher.
While this can no doubt affect NVIDIA and ATI in the future in some proportion, there would be a lot of savings for publishers, and for gamers. Cloud in theory is Green-friendly, saving energy.
David Perry points out any browser with Flash is capable of displaying streamed games, but he forgot to mention Steve Jobs recently explained why iPad doesn’t support Adobe Flash,
How he’s able to play World of Warcraft in the iPad with lack of flash is not specifically explained. According to Steve Jobs, the iPad supports HTML5, so that’s the guess. The Gaikai CEO mentioned plans for Mac Servers support.
Apple doesn’t support flash because they are app-nazis
their loss though, android/maemo/win7mobile will benefit from it
also valve has been running cloud computing for their games for a while now sooooooo…
as for “The technology potentially eliminates the need to have a top notch graphic card and water-cooling rig, The publisher hosts a copy of the game and streams it to you via your internet browser without any need to install plugins nor download any file. All that is done by the publisher.”
lol
Yep sounds great, kinda like ubisofts new DRM which has the scene riled up and begging for more ubigames so they can crack them… I mean why wouldn’t we want to give developers and publishers direct control over what we play and when we play it! And I mean a world where we can’t have the best performance because we rely on companies to provide for us (who will cut corners for profit) sounds fantastic!