Gaikai For ... Publishers & Developers

As a game publisher or developer, what's the best weapon in your online marketing arsenal? Banner ads? Nope. Game trailers? Sorry. Gameplay videos? Guess again.

"Gaikai brings new opportunities and capabilities that will improve both our craft and products, including secure beta-testing and the ability to instantaneously bring the latest games into the hands of our waiting audience."

Richard Hilleman Chief Creative Director
Electronic Arts

The answer is: your game. The best way to sell your game is let players play your game, as simply and conveniently as possible. But how?

That's where Gaikai comes in.

Gaikai's streaming video game technology allows gamers to try your games online, instantly, with nothing more than a standard web browser running Flash or Java. There are no forms to fill out. There's nothing to download or install. There's no special hardware to buy. It's just your game, available to try, with a single click.

Easy to try, easy to buy

The past few years have yielded some surprises for the gaming industry. Smartphones made buying and installing games and apps dead simple, and they generated over a billion downloads in just 9 months. Casual games on social networks like Facebook have racked up tens of millions of users by making it incredibly easy to start playing. No credit card, registration, or download is required. It's just click-and-play, and it's instantly addictive.

Gaikai aims to bring that same ease-of-use to traditional console and PC games. By making these games easily playable online using only the most standard web technologies, we open up games to a whole new market of potential players. There's a massive, untapped audience of new gamers just waiting to be drawn in.

We're talking full games here, too. You can limit the length of the demos to whatever you want, but ultimately, the user is playing the real thing. That means no need to throw together a last-minute demo or preview version of the game. You can plow that extra cash back into the product itself. (And your developers will love you too.)

Better beta, better games

Gaikai is more than just the best way to market your games. It's also the best way to beta test your games. Because the games are run exclusively on Gaikai's servers, there's no risk of piracy or code leakage. You can safely and securely test your games with a wide audience of players. When the test is over, we just flip a switch, and the game is instantly withdrawn. Try doing that with DVDs.

Beta tests run on Gaikai have distinct advantages over traditional testing. For example, whenever there is a crash, Gaikai can capture footage of the gameplay that caused it, allowing you to quickly pinpoint the exact cause of the crash. We can even let you watch video of gameplay in real-time, so you can learn how players are interacting with the game as they're playing.

Ready for launch

Gaikai wants to help you launch your games. We know how important pre-orders are to your bottom line. We can get your game in the hands of buyers -- days, weeks, even months before it is released -- to stimulate excitement about the release and to generate robust pre-sales of the title.

Because your games run in the cloud, you don't have to worry about the game being leaked or pirated before the release. You can make the game available for a limited period of time -- like during a conference such as E3 or GDC -- and then pull it back when the time is up. You can easily and seamlessly patch and upgrade your game to fix last-minute bugs. And once it's time to release the game, Gaikai can run demos of the game on our partner sites to augment your traditional marketing efforts.

We've barely scratched the surface of the number of ways in which Gaikai can help games publishers and developers. To find out how to add your games to Gaikai, please email publishers@gaikai.com.