Speaking with Eurogamer, Gaikai head David Perry explained how beneficial it was to sell the cloud-gaming service to Sony, and more specifically to a console group.
Perry explained that Gaikai’s service would have faced greater difficulties had it been destined to the PC. Gaikai would have to have taken source code and adapted it to play through the controller, as apposed to keyboard and mouse.
The clearly proud Gaikai main-man says the deal with Sony is going to “make the publishers very happy.”
“Publishers like PC, but they love console,” states Perry.
“The message I kept getting back was, PC is cool, but I wish you could do this with console. That’s the real meat in our business. That would be really good.
“Of course, we had to go, look at this new PC stuff we have! We had to keep avoiding the console question. It’s a very difficult question. If you look at the P&Ls of the publishers, that’s such an important piece of their business. We were like, don’t look over there. Focus on the PC.
“But the console question never went away. I had a major publisher recently say to me, David, just to be clear, the iPhone is interesting to us. Not as interesting as console. PC? Not as interesting as console. Just to be clear,” he added.
Perry spoke of how the Sony deal assured publishers of having a good financial backing, and so publishers would be more at ease to put their “biggest games” on the service.
Perry explained that publishers had to be sure that Gaikai were going to have the “financial muscle” to support it.
“When you’re a start-up, it’s harder to answer that question. But when you’ve got Sony behind you, it’s very easy to answer that question,” he explained.
