Eurogamer launches Gaikai game streaming

Titles like Crysis 2 and FIFA 12 now available to gamers

Eurogamer and Gaikai have partnered to provide free game streaming of AAA titles like Crysis 2 and FIFA 12.

"Gaikai's goal is to put the best games in the world at the fingertips of the best gamers in the world," says David Perry, Gaikai CEO.

"Eurogamer has an incredibly passionate audience and we expect they will make great use of our instant gaming technology."

Titles like Magicka and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings are also available now, with more games becoming available in the near future.

"Being able to stream AAA games through a browser would have been unimaginable just a few years ago and we're thrilled to be able to offer this to our readers," added Eurogamer operations director Tom Bramwell.

The service is also planned to extend to Eurogamer's sites in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Czech Republic.

Game streaming service Gaikai is currently aiming for 100 million users by 2012. In an interviewwith GamesIndustry.biz in September, Perry spoke about the potential of the service.

"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.'"

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Latest comments (17)

Paul Shirley Programmers 9 years ago

"Sorry...

Your bandwidth is not sufficient to stream a high quality experience. Please turn off other Internet-enabled applications or devices and try again. "

Epic fail if a solid 10Mbit cable connection cant deliver.

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Richard Gardner Artist, Crytek9 years ago

I had a blast with this on my horrible BT home connection a few weeks back, the feeling of instantly clicking a link and been seconds away from playing the game is really refreshing, even if slightly laggy and blurry. It was easy to still enjoy a game and see what it was like.

As far as buying a full cloud product? Meh... I'm really struggling to see this moving forward. But in 6 or 10 years? Possible... a lot of consumer culture can change in that time.

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David Wicks Editor / Co-Founder, Gamers Heaven9 years ago

Ping = 43ms
D/L = 44.53 Mbps
U/L = 5.79

i have 100Mbit line and above speedtest was over wifi (n) done seconds after i got the:

"Sorry...

Your bandwidth is not sufficient to stream a high quality experience. Please turn off other Internet-enabled applications or devices and try again. "

message...)

If i cant play it on my line then they might as well give up now, this service is useless...

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Show all comments (17)

David Wicks Editor / Co-Founder, Gamers Heaven9 years ago

UPDATE:

retested with wired connection, using a gigabit network:

Ping = 32
D/L = 94.92
U/L = 5.57

AND I STILL DON'T HAVE ENOUGH BANDWIDTH? seriously?

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Account Closed CEO, Gaikai Inc.9 years ago

David, please email support@gaikai.com they "LOVE" to find cases like this so we can get the appropriate feedback into our FAQ. Normal tests don't show things like data stability/packet loss/peering routes etc. Anyway, we're more than happy to help.

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Ryan Breed VP Development, Gaikai Inc.9 years ago

Bolting on here -- note that when you test your connection using Speedtest, you're testing the connection quality to the speedtest servers. When Gaikai tests your connection, we're testing against our closest data center. It's possible that you are in an area that's not yet within reach of our many data centers.

If so, rest assured your connection results will feed into our expansion plans. :-)

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Klaus Preisinger Freelance Writing 9 years ago

Germany:

Kabel Deutschland 6Mbit: Works fine, stream has a lot of artifacts. Lag is noticeable, though not a dealbreaker. Beats playing Bejeweled on your netbook, I suppose.

Kabel Deutschland 32 Mbit: Fewer artifacts, same lag.

150 Mbit synchronous fiber optic connection: Lag on par with wireless keyboard and mouse system. Less lag than KD. On a 4000€/month line, this is actually quite close to playing it on a 1000€ computer. For the moment, I still go with the local computer. :D

I bet there will be some company calls this week on how to firewall this thing. High ping ADSL connections might be more of a problem than bandwidth. Can't wait to get my hands on an Asus Transformer Prime in the future and test this again. I just don't understand why there aren't more games where lag is less of a problem, such as Civ5, or Sins of a Solar Empire. The catalog is rather twitch centric.

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gi biz ;,pgc.eu 9 years ago

I guess gaikai.com is the correct link, right? Except the top menu, clicking anywhere has absolutely no effect :/

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David Wicks Editor / Co-Founder, Gamers Heaven9 years ago

@David & Ryan, i'm in dublin, where would the nearest server be to me? i'll speedtest & pingtest a server close to that and see what results i get and forward on the info to the email you provided :) or if you guys have a server you use yourself for speedtesting customers looking for support link me up and i'll use that as well :)

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Julien Wera Marketing & PR Manager, Massive - A Ubisoft Studio9 years ago

That's a very interesting experiment, and I'd love to see it work and succeed. Unfortunately, for any reason, it doesn't seem to work at all on Chrome.

Tried again on IE, and after some installation/plugin update time, I had the same error as everyone : not enough bandwith, and this with an effective 10MB wired connection.

I have no doubt it will work at some point, unfortunately a launch like this, without enough tests before, will just put a bad reputation on the service for the player community.

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Rob Jessop R&D Programmer, Crytek9 years ago

I didn't realise anyone was streaming Crysis 2. Good luck David and team!

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Richard Gardner Artist, Crytek9 years ago

Just to help, I'm in Nottingham and the highest speed I ever get on my connection downloading is 600-700KBs which works out at around a 5-6mb connection (I hate BT with a passion!). I can play in 720p with no artefacts and about 100ms which is very impressive. The lag is noticeable but great for demo's and checking out new games you intend to buy.

Much like Ryan said it must be something to do with your distance from the server, as I'm in Nottingham I probably have one fairly close as its in the middle of the country.

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João Namorado Project Manager, Portugal Telecom9 years ago

Network infrastructure is an important factor with this technology. My company is doing this as an exclusive service for our ISP customers: connection to the streaming servers is sure to be on par to deliver a quality experience. It also makes billing a much more streamlined and easy process. (Please note that these are my personal comments on the matter and not necessarily the views of my company.)

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Brian Smith Artist 9 years ago

Top marks for GaiKai support when the CEO pitches in with comment. It's only a matter of time before this is the way to play. Can't wait. Tried onlive and was really impressed and will be trying this one soon. Most seem to say between 2-5 years for these to be indistinguishable from playing directly on the client's hardware but it's still amazing.

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Pete Leonard , Amiqus9 years ago

I tried it earlier today and got the same result although David did make it clear in an interview about the service that during it's inception, they will still be growing. Pwhich makes sense given the intense investment that Online have made. Gaikai will grow organically based on consumer demand. I also think that this is the way the industry will go - just check out what is happening with Google+, I can see that becoming the defacto online portal for anyone with an internet connection for....well just about everything!

I have to second what Brian said too - it's pretty impressive for the seniokr guys at Gaikai to be feeding back on online publications like this!

Good luck with it guys and David, if you can make this happen....surely a Messiah HD remake wouldn't be impossible?

Please?

Pretty please?

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Dan Howdle Head of Content, Existent9 years ago

Critical body becomes publisher. Bit church and state, isn't it? Or maybe that's just me.

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Curt Sampson Sofware Developer 9 years ago

I think it's just you. Providing a sales channel does not make you a publisher, or Gamestop would be a publisher. And Eurogamer, like most web sites, already has relationships with publishers in that they sell advertising to them. I think they need only apply the same standards to this as they do to that: i.e., make sure that the the editorial department is kept independent of the advertising and game sales departments.

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Eurogamer at 20: Adapting to a changing industry

Is there a moment in my game worth sharing?