Gaikai targets 100 million users by 2012

Ambitious cloud gaming service Gaikai is targeting 100 million users by the end of 2012, according to CEO David Perry.
The company has passed the previous 10 million target through affiliates, with Perry likening the business to that of retail giant Amazon rather than any other company in the games space.
"We are targeting 100 million as quickly as we can possibly get there," he said, speaking in an exclusive interview published today. "We need to get above the reach of any single game entity in the industry a quickly as we can.
The ability to pull a lever and have a million people play your game… that will be really quite straight forward.

David Perry, Gaikai

Using affiliate websites - retailers, entertainment destinations - Gaikai can place games directly in front of established audiences, with Perry claiming it's easy to hit another one million users at the touch of a button.
"The ability to pull a lever and have a million people play your game is something that's crazy to even think about today. That's a very difficult problem, yet with cloud gaming that will be really quite straight forward. A normal way of thinking will be, 'I want another million and another million'.
"It turns out that the number one way to get people to buy is trying your product, and it's amazing that game trials are being made so difficult," he added.
Perry is also aware of the amount of responsibility that places on the company, having to build a infrastructure for partners to reach huge audiences reliably - and that's part of the reason the company has only so far been offering demo content rather than full game streaming like rival OnLive.
"We are a company doing this for other people. 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. 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'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."
The full interview with Perry, where he also discusses the complexity of building a dedicated Gaikai controller, modding and cloud gaming's 'dinosaur' moment, can be read here.

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