InstantAction's Louis Castle

It's basically really simple. We got very close to a lot of deals with a lot of potential partners, and as we're doing that we got very close with our game. So we thought 'well, we've been waiting for you guys to get over your anxiety and all that', and they're waiting and saying 'well, show us something that drawing millions of people and so on.' So I think 'okay, we're so close now with this, we'll put all of these deals on hold, we're going to go do our game and we'll show you how it works and the proof of the pudding.'

And meanwhile we actually did do a deal with Greenhouse Games at PAX Prime, we're going to be coming out with all the Greenhouse games. We'll start with a couple of them and then we'll roll them out. So you'll start seeing the breadth of titles from them and obviously our own stuff, and then the size and volume of the stuff that we're doing with InstantJam.

Well, you have to remember that we're going after triple-A titles. I can't mention which ones because we're not under contract. These are their crown jewels. So they want to make sure that our system is stable, it's out there, it scales well, the customers are going to have a good time. That's understandable. And we've done a lot of testing, we've been through their labs and things like that, and many of the publishers went through things like costs. We're waiting for signatures, basically. We were so close with InstantJam, we just thought 'you know what? Why don't we just put out our game, we'll show you how it works, and then come back to you guys.'

That's the answer: we're ready, but they want to see proof, and this it.

I think that Gaikai and OnLive are great technologies, but it's going to be a while before they're a good experience for everybody. It'll certainly be a long time, if ever, that they're appropriate for all games. So what we're doing is showing that... well, this [gestures at PC] is not a great internet connection, for instance. I've shown this demo on netbooks, over 3G. That's not coming any time soon on these other platforms. I think that the idea that the network speeds are going up all the time and latency is going down... that's true on average, but the actual latency is getting worse and worse because there's more and more people online. Eventually, way down the road, everybody will have ubiquitous high speed connections and that's great. We're happy too, we just want to deliver our games to our customers. InstantAction is about delivering discoverable, shareable, embeddable content that is of console-standard quality.

The interesting thing about Google and native client and all that is games still have to be written or ported to a native client solution. Which is fine for small games, Plants vs Zombies and things like that, but I really don't think that unless there's some financial incentive, that the guys who are doing the next Medal of Honor or the next Call of Duty or the next Crysis are going to go racing out and writing it for a browser. This technology lets them write the game for whatever they want to write. If they write it on the Xbox, it's an immediate port from the Xbox to PC, you've got to change the interface but all of a sudden you can have a PC and a Mac version. It uses all the web SSL stuff to keep the security, so piracy's going to go way down, and we get to reach a big audience. Get a Facebook app out of it too. So it's pretty cool - I wouldn't come and join InstantAction as the CEO if I didn't think it was a great opportunity. But I don't see this as the ultimate technology. I just see this as a great way of going where we need to go today. One day, it may be that everything's streamed off server farms. Maybe. There's a lot of reasons I think that's going to be a while.