Rock, Paper, Shotgun

What a terrible name, for a games on demand thinger. Anyway, below there’s 17-minutes of footage of the Shiny-one talking about Gaikai, his latest project, courtesy of all-seeing news-tube VG247. In it he reveals that the service is looking at a launch in California in “the first quarter of 2010″, with a beta test proceeding it. All being profitable at that point, they’ll roll out to “the whole of the US”. No one’s taken up the cloud gaming baton for Europe’s (okay, maybe just the UK, the rest of Europe sounds like some kind of broadband utopia if comments below are to be believed) creaky broadband infrastructure as yet, and I can’t say I blame them.
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One of the more interesting sessions at this year’s GDC was entirely off-campus. Dave Perry invited a load of chums to lunch, with a select press audience. Present were people like Raph Koster, Peter Molyneux, EA’s Neil Young, Chris Taylor, Dave Perry and some bloke from Sony. And then they all had a good chin-wag. Annoyingly, Rossignol was present – as he’s never going to shut up about it – and has written up the session for Videogaming247. In it, he says things like…

This led Phil Harrison to point out that games are taking too long to make. “The speed of iteration has to change,” said the Sony giant. Koster argued that games were shamed by the web, whose speed of iteration of web-sites was lightening fast. “Flickr patches every half hour!” he exclaimed.

I suspect more from the session will emerge over the coming weeks, but in the mean time, Next Gen have some quotes over here.

Talking to new blog on the block Videogaming247.com, David “Used-To-Run-Shiny” Perry said ““It’s extremely nerdy, World Of Warcraft”, by way of explaining why the fantasy MMO hasn’t already headed off into the realms of tens of millions of players.

“I believe there’s a 70 million player MMO idea and no one’s done it yet because we haven’t got anyone that’s thinking down the Will Wright path,” he said. “There’s people that get close. There’s people that do Club Penguin, or Maple Story, games that are more simple to play, and people like Disney buy them for $500-$600 million and no one bats an eyelid and everyone goes off and makes another Bioshock.

Perry went on to say that his free-to-play MMO, 2Moons, now has five million people signed up to play.