Gaikai Lands $10 Million Of Additional Funding

Cloud-based gaming service Gaikai said Monday it received an additional $10 million of series B funding from Rustic Canyon Partners, Triplepoint Capital and a "mystery investor." Gaikai will launch initially as a means for publishers to advertise and demo games in web browsers. The company, led by CEO and industry stalwart David Perry, said the service will launch in North America "soon," without offering a firm date. The company says users will be able to click on an ad banner on a website, and be dropped immediately into a game with the ability to play it largely free of local hardware constraints, as all of the control and visual data is streamed between the user's broadband-equipped computer and a Gaikai datacenter. The new funding will help Gaikai ramp up efforts for the U.S. launch of the service, as well as help the service support more devices. Gaikai's streaming technology recently made internet rounds, with Perry showing World of Warcraft running on an iPad. Perry unveiled Gaikai in summer 2009, shortly after Steve Perlman's OnLive arrived on the scene. While both are cloud-gaming solutions, their business models are substantially different. OnLive will launch later this year as a subscription-based portal for gamers to buy access to streaming games, not as a customer acquisition tool like Gaikai, which will make its revenue by charging game publishers to place demos all over the web. Gaikai said that it will be announcing further partnerships and strategic industry investments "soon." As part of today's announced funding, Rustic Canyon Partners' Nate Redmond will join the Gaikai board. In January, regulatory filings revealed that Gaikai raised $5 million in venture capital funding. Gaikai was formed by Perry, along with Andrew Gault and Rui Pereira. Gault and Pereira originally conceived Gaikai as a "YouTube-style portal for classic console games," Gault said in a recent interview. When friends said they'd rather be playing streaming World of Warcraft, the two changed their focus to higher-end PC titles.