David Perry: physical games media is on its last breath

Physical games media may be at the sunset of their lives, according to David Perry. Speaking at an opening keynote in UK for the 4th Annual Develop Conference in Brighton, the GaiKai founder expressed his belief that “It won’t be long before 100 per cent of games are all online.”

Physical games media may be at the sunset of their lives, according to David Perry. Speaking at an opening keynote in UK for the 4th Annual Develop Conference in Brighton, the Gaikai founder expressed his belief that “It won’t be long before 100 per cent of games are all online.”

He even gave credit to Facebook for providing game content to the users without the need of physical data. He described it as “a major step forward.” But within the same breath, he also talked about the not-so-good things that going all digital on games will bring.

For one, there’s the excruciating wait for those download times, registration processes, installation procedures and so on and so forth. These, according to Perry, impede the experience of play, which is the most essential allure of video games.

Then he compared it to the successful App Store of Apple, coupled with the one tap to install, one tap to play gadget iPhone. It would seem that he attributes the success of the App Store, having raked in 1.5 billion downloads in its first year alone, to the efficiency and simplicity of the gadget.

So (and here he segues rather smoothly), those friction problems, you won’t have that in Gaikai. You’ll only need 1.2MB to run the service even, and for sure, more than half of the UK and US population should have sufficient bandwidth to use Gaikai.

In a nutshell, physical games media is a dying breed. Soon, they will all be wiped out, leaving our games to the memories of our computers and consoles, appreciated by the byte. But acquiring it may prove to be such a hassle, especially because of the preliminaries you have to do before you can enjoy. But don’t worry, those frictions won’t be a problem for you — if you use Gaikai.

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Via Develop