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Gaikai's Nanea Reeves

The chief strategy office details growth through affiliate, developer and retail partner schemes

GamesIndustry.biz How many publishing partners have you got signed up? Is it still only Electronic Arts?
Nanea Reeves

We are signed with EA, which had been public for a while, and then at E3 we obviously have garnered a lot of interest from the other publishers as well as we're in conversation with a lot of them. We'll make some announcements on two more very shortly.

GamesIndustry.biz Gaikai seems to do a lot of stuff quite stealthily - what comes after growing the 10 million affiliate network?
Nanea Reeves

Well, we're starting to focus on how we scale beyond that discovery network so we're also signing on a lot of online retailers and we'll have some announcements in that area very soon, in the next few days. Obviously as a conversion tool allowing customers to jump in and try a game before you buy it, it's very gamer friendly and our early test results are showing significant impact on the conversion rate by allowing them to jump right in the game. They don't have to go through a download and all that.

The challenge is you get a customer that might be playing a game in their browser but they can't play the game on their Mac. In that case we've been approached – how do we support that customer, and can we transition them to an always on full game stream?

You don't have to put a custom chip in [a TV]. And that's a big deal for the manufacturers. Their lead times are very long

GamesIndustry.biz It's also interesting that you're adding functionality to games - like the 3D solution where games that aren't natively in 3D get that added via Gaikai.
Nanea Reeves

We're working in partnership with Nvidia, so we'll work with them to perfect their drivers and make sure everything streams...

GamesIndustry.biz I guess that's an additional paid-for service that publishers pay extra for from you guys?
Nanea Reeves

It's a premium service from us. Obviously it is a very attractive feature for the new TVs coming out in 3D.

GamesIndustry.biz Basically you're adding a whole new function without the television manufacturers or developers having to do it themselves...
Nanea Reeves

I'm not sure that anybody else is doing this just yet either. It looks great once you play in 3D.

GamesIndustry.biz How long have you been offering that as a service?
Nanea Reeves

We showed this first at CES, that was the first place we showed it and now we've been fine tuning it. We just built out our network to support the more high end content, so we're just starting to ship those servers out. So what you're seeing is, you're probably one of the first people to actually see this server in action.

GamesIndustry.biz Beyond the Eurogamer affiliation, what other plans have you got for Europe?
Nanea Reeves

Well Eurogamer's our first big partner launch for the affiliate network and we are also talking to some online retailers through an aggregator so that will be something we announce once we finalise the details. Europe's very important to us of course, it's a huge PC game market as well as just gamers in general. We don't want to just be in UK, we have to be in Germany, especially, right?

GamesIndustry.biz You're also beginning to show Gaikai running on TV sets without any inbuilt hardware. Purely via a web browser.
Nanea Reeves

It's being remotely controlled with the RF controller, we just wanted to see if we could do it. So there's nothing local, no box, it's streaming from the web. We show LEGO Star Wars – we worked with the manufacturing company's engineers to get this working. It's just a proof of concept to see if it was really possible and so we're now we're starting to figure out how we continue to scale that. You don't have to put a custom chip in there. And that's a big deal for the manufacturers obviously. Their lead times are very long.

GamesIndustry.biz It's interesting that you're adding functionality, 3D, controls for iPad games not designed for the interface, but where does that stop? You don't want to go down the line too far where you're becoming part of a development team.
Nanea Reeves

No not at all because we're not, we're actually facilitating that as a service layer so it becomes available to all of our partners.

Another way to think of it is that Gaikai will be a platform, so we'll have an SDK that developers can build against to access some of this functionality and to tailor their game experience ideally for the places that we're targeting.

But it's not necessary for them to do that. Without any effort we can deploy to multiple devices. So that's key for our growth, that's the longer term plan. Having a game team available to you is an amazing thing. Often times they're gone working on another project so no one even knows how to administrate the code so we need to be very flexible.

OnLive is announcing that they're launching from Facebook, we're actually embedded in there

GamesIndustry.biz And you've got Facebook integration now as well.
Nanea Reeves

It's just from within a web browser and David [Perry] has tweeted about this. If you just think we can embed in any web page, that would include Facebook, so it's not a big deal. OnLive is announcing that they're launching from Facebook, we're actually embedded in there. We like those guys, they've done a great job, it's just a very different business model.

GamesIndustry.biz Would you ever consider taking this service straight to the consumer rather than via publishers?
Nanea Reeves

It's not our first goal. Technically we can, obviously, but we're building it as templates, and then you have to think about customer acquisition etcetera, you're competitive in the space, we think there's a big opportunity right now to help people evolve their digital strategies, as you said, some people have some catching up to do. And so if that's our primary focus it's just a much better arena for us. And then it simplifies also our business relationships with them. We become a service. We can power your channel for you though, if you don't want to have that relationship we can certainly do it.

GamesIndustry.biz It sounds like the company is growing very rapidly. Can you scale up that quickly?
Nanea Reeves

It's a good question.

GamesIndustry.biz Because I remember the first Gaikai announcement when it was just David Perry and a couple of guys in a room.
Nanea Reeves

Yeah, now he's got a nice management team. I have a lot of e-commerce background, we've already built out our data warehouse, so you start to see a much beefier management team, and we bring in our own resources as well. I've been building a lot of the data warehouse environment which is up and running now and built on the same solution that Zynga and Groupon are using so we're doing this as a pro company and the focus for our growth is to build out that service layer. Many of us have done it before at other companies so it's just bringing in the right people. We've got the hard part done, which is doing the impossible, which is delivering that low latency.

GamesIndustry.biz Do you think you've convinced the audience now of what Gaikai is and can achieve?
Nanea Reeves

They can see it, we can demonstrate it. So now what's going to make or break us our ability to build out that service. So we've got the whole advertising, try before you buy stuff, in place getting ready to go live and we've launched our affiliate network. That demonstrates that the platform works and now we're adding this other service.

GamesIndustry.biz So I guess you subscribe to this theory that it's now about two screens in the living room? There's the screen there that the whole family is watching and then everyone has got their own personal screen.
Nanea Reeves

I do. I think you've got a lot of things competing for your attention, honestly when I play console, I've got my laptop and Youtube walkthroughs. I'm ashamed to say but it's true. Being able to get the experience, to access it through your browser I think is a key differentiator for our company. Everything has a browser now in it. And we can also go native as well, we can integrate with your own applications. If I'm playing on the television and I can pop the experience into my iPad when I go the bathroom, I can do that and never stop playing. I can play in boring meetings under the table on my phone, so it's that ubiquity.

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Matt Martin

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Matt Martin joined GamesIndustry in 2006 and was made editor of the site in 2008. With over ten years experience in journalism, he has written for multiple trade, consumer, contract and business-to-business publications in the games, retail and technology sectors.