Why He's Powerful
David Perry was the founder of Shiny Entertainment, the studio behind games like Earthworm Jim, MDK and Enter The Matrix. But roughly a year after the company's merger with The Collective to form Double Helix Games, Perry moved on to form Gaikai, a streaming service for games.
Perry had big plans for the service, expecting to offer it to publishers rather than to compete with them, like the position OnLive seems to place themselves in, which lets players play major, modern video games in weird places like in their browser window, thanks to tech that streams the game's graphics and sound to the player while sending the player's controller inputs back out to a server. Think of it as playing a PlayStation game, but with the PlayStation's controller cord extending 100 miles away to a one PlayStation in a room full of PlayStations. This cloud-gaming approach, Perry's been saying, is the way gaming is going. No discs needed. No consoles may even be needed, not in your living room.
Sony announced that on June 29th the company had bought Gaikai, for $380 million. Offering the cloud-streaming service for the PlayStation has some interesting implications for the future.