Gaikai - Streaming Worlds™

Gaikai is a revolutionary new technology that lets you play any game online in your browser. In the age of the cloud, when all your documents, email, photos and videos are instantly reachable online, it seems archaic that you still need to install gigabytes of game files on an expensive PC with an even more expensive video card. And even then you can only play from that specific computer!

Gaikai takes a radical new approach – we host the games, we run them, we worry about hardware and software updates, and we stream them to you. Full resolution, full speed, stereo sound, low lag, no compromise. The only thing you need is a browser and an internet connection.

We call this Streaming Worlds, taking the full richness of modern computer games to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Why

For a long time gaming on the PC meant buying a DVD and installing software on your home computer. Doing so gives your games almost unlimited access to your hardware, allowing cutting edge graphics, high quality sound and perfect control with your mouse and keyboard. But this comes at a price – many gigabytes of your hard drive are consumed, you’d better have an expensive video card, and if your computer is more than a year or two old you can forget about it. And even after committing to keep your computer up to date, can you play from anywhere? No way! This expensive new game can only be played on the one computer where you installed it!

In the last few years browser based games have emerged as a much needed alternative. Nothing is installed on your computer, and you can play from anywhere with an internet connection as easily as typing a web address. Old computer? No problem. Browser games don’t need access to you hardware, ancient or modern – indeed, they can’t get at it even if they wanted to. They are deliberately locked inside a security “sandbox”, so all the power of your machine, all the gorgeous gizmos hidden inside, are being wasted while you play. You want in-your-face 3D graphics? You wish! You’ll have to settle for something that last looked good ten years ago.

So there’s your choice: a costly state of the art DVD game trapped on your machine – or a dated browser game you can play anywhere. Or, rather, that was the choice till now. Now there’s Gaikai; now there’s Streaming Worlds.

Gaikai takes a radical new approach that combines the best of both worlds. Now you can play the latest cutting-edge games anywhere there’s an internet connection – on any computer, even if it’s a few years old and misses 3D graphics hardware. There’s nothing to install, not even a browser plugin. And the games Gaikai supports are current games, ones never originally designed to be run in the browser.

We call this Streaming Worlds, taking the full richness of modern computer games to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

How do we do it?

The browser “sandbox” may curtail gaming, but it does not limit the streaming of video. As YouTube and a multitude of copycats have shown, streaming videos online in a web browser is fast, efficient and reliable. This is the key to our technology. When you play a game through our service, you are actually watching a video stream. A very high resolution, high quality, stream with stereo sound, but in essence no different to the last video clip you watched.

We install the latest games on our servers in purpose-designed data centres. We worry about the cost of the latest 3D video card, the gigabytes of game files, staying up to date with the latest patches and drivers, and all the other headaches involved in modern PC gaming. Our high performance software takes care of turning the game output into a high quality video stream on the fly, ready for you to watch and play, in a few milliseconds. Your input – every keystroke, every mouse click – is sent back over an encrypted channel to the game.

All you need is a broadband internet connection, a web browser, and the latest Adobe Flash player (which you almost certainly already have). Nothing is installed, no clutter is left behind, and you don’t need to be an administrator on the computer.