Gaikai can bring MMO player acquisition costs down - Perry

"We've been speaking to Blizzard from day one. They are without doubt the kind of company we can help"
Gaikai Inc.


Gaikai's David Perry believes that his game-streaming service can help bring down the high user acquisition costs associated with massively multiplayer online games.
Speaking to GamesIndustry International, Perry said online ads for games such as Blizzard's World of Warcraft are expensive and create too much friction - when ads could be replaced with links to stream a demo of a game directly in the user's browser.
"We believe we can really help get the cost of players down in terms of bringing more people in at a lower cost than publishers pay today," said Perry. "That's one of the reasons we made Gaikai in the first place. I was in the MMO space and thinking 'goodness we have to help solve this' because it's so expensive to get players to come and try your games."
You'll see us doing more and more MMOs, it's a very important part of this puzzle.
David Perry, Gaikai

"We have our favourites that we've been going after," he added. "We've been speaking to Blizzard from day one of the company. They are without doubt the kind of company that we can help because they run Google ads all over the internet to try to drive traffic into their game. And our position is, instead of doing that, why not put the game there, wherever it is, and that person can play the game.
"You're not moving the person and you're not having to pay to move the person around anymore, it's right in front of them. Each MMO company, when they think through their funnel and acquisition costs it just makes sense. "
Gaikai announced a couple of weeks ago that it has struck a deal to stream demos of Dungeons & Dragons Online and The Lord of the Rings Online, part of an early move into the MMO space for the cloud gaming company.
In press demonstrations the Gaikai team has often used World of Warcraft to demonstrate the service, most notably streaming the fan-favourite to iPad and on social networking site Facebook.
MMOs have been on the agenda for a long time, revealed Perry, but various obstacles have held up bringing online RPGs to the cloud.
"It's taken longer than we thought because of discussions on how to handle patching and all that kind of stuff but we're finally out now.
"You'll see us doing more and more MMOs, it's a very important part of this puzzle. Those games are some of the biggest titles there are, I don't know if you're ever going to download such a big game onto your iPad. There's a problem there. This bridges the gap."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...sts-down-perry