
Sony to buy cloud-gaming firm Gaikai for $380 million - chewymouse
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57464676-93/sony-to-buy-cloud-gaming-firm-gaikai-for-$380-million/?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=News-Internet&Media
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CodeCube
This is great news for these guys! They've been working on the tech for years
and I'm glad to see a good exit for them. For those of you who don't know,
David Perry is the guy who brought us Earthworm Jim :D
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Perry_%28game_developer%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Perry_%28game_developer%29)

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confluence
> _The deal comes only a matter of weeks after the E3 expo, at which Gaikai's
> chief executive David Perry flat out denied there was any deal between the
> two companies._

Never ever believe anything that comes out of a person's mouth. This
especially includes start-up founders and even yours truly (me).

Everything is for sale.

But in this case, I actually have no idea what Sony is actually buying? Could
someone enlighten me as to why this is worth $380 million? It appears to be a
super low latency video streamer/pusher with backend rendering and licensing
agreements with various game publishers.

> Fortune reported that the cloud-based game streaming company hired bankers
> to help it find a buyer and expected a deal "well in excess" of $500
> million.

Never ever believe anything written by Forbes or any other business
publication (or any publication - period). If governments are bought and paid
for (I kid), what does that make a business magazine?

Old, jaded, sarcastic and cynical is what I am. World - what have you done to
me!

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teamonkey
> But in this case, I actually have no idea what Sony is actually buying?
> Could someone enlighten me as to why this is worth $380 million? It appears
> to be a super low latency video streamer/pusher with backend rendering and
> licensing agreements with various game publishers.

You play games over Gaikai. Controller input and video decoding at the client
end, top-end gaming hardware and video compression at the server end.

The point is that people can play top-end games on a very low-spec PC (or STB)
instead of a $900+ PC because the rendering is done off-site. There's lag,
sure, but it's not as big a deal as you'd expect. The PCs at their end are
virtualized, of course and not all games require the same resources at all
times.

As far as I know Gaikai's business model was based around publishers paying
them to provide free demos of games for maximum exposure (I could be wrong).
In contrast their competitors OnLive have a monthly subscription service of
full games similar to Netflix.

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ippisl
Owning a strong gaming platform seems like a good way to get a lot of
cheap/free GPU cycles[1].In light of the recent google "cat" computer vision
experiment, that showed us that the road to a big leap in AI might just need a
lot of hardware, that's a good position to be in.

[1]Since latency is important, cloud gaming platforms serve population who
live in similar time zones and users don't usually play while at work, making
the platform relatively unused in working hours.

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molmalo
How long until Microsoft buys onLive then?

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mariusmg
For what ?! Sony seems to trying to use Gaikai as some sort as backward
compatibility magic solution. MS doesn't needs that.

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simba-hiiipower
According to a recently leaked 'Xbox 720' deck (dated August 2010) they cited
cloud-based gaming and media streaming as being a key feature they'd integrate
into their next console by 2015 [1]. OnLive is discussed as both a potential
competitor and a way to help facilitate that (as an acquisition) in this
regard.

The original file has been taken down and I can't seem to find it [anyone?]
but I also remember they made some comment to the effect that this upcoming
console generation would likely be the last (as we traditionally know it) and
more robust future OnLive-like services would take over beyond that.

Given that, I think an OnLive acquisition makes sense on their part and will
probably happen at some point.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/more-xbox-leaks-
micros...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/more-xbox-leaks-microsoft-
once-considered-an-onlive-acquisition/)

