Gaikai Cloud-Based Games Service Enters Open Beta With 11,000 Public Users

Gaikai founder Dave Perry has announced that the cloud-based gaming service has entered open beta, with 11,000 invitations going out to selected members of the public over the past 48 hours. "On Sunday afternoon we decided to stop coming up with excuses not to launch Gaikai to the public and silently sent out a blast of 1,000 invites around the world," Perry wrote on his blog. "We sent out another 10,000 invites and players are currently hitting 15 of our 24 data centers," he continued. "No issues have been reported that we can't fix this month." The Gaikai team plan to send out additional invitations in waves of 10,000, scaling up use of the service in increments and addressing issues as they arise through the process. The site, which allows users to stream games to their web broswer without the need to install, launched with Mass Effect 2. "Bioware simply rocks," Perry wrote. "They've been very supportive as has Electronic Arts. The good news for them is we are getting a surprising amount of people clicking 'BUY' without even making them a special offer." Perry went on to claim that he is currently brokering around 60 separate deals with "publishers, retailers, media sites, electronics makers and telecom companies" and that the company has made some significant hires in the past few weeks. Potential players can register their interest in the open beta on the service's website. "Everyone will be getting invited in batches and if you are too far from our servers, don't worry you've actually helped as you've shown us where we need to install more data centers," Perry wrote.