If would-be customers don't have a Wikipad or a USB controller, though, how will they control their games? One of the major challenges for cloud gaming services like Gaikai is figuring out how to deal with the growing popularity of devices that only have touchscreens. Here, though, Gaikai has aces in the hole: Brendon Iribe just so happened to be the president, CEO, and co-founder of Scaleform before its acquisition by Autodesk last year.
If you're not familiar, Scaleform created an extremely popular middleware solution for building scalable video game user interfaces, used in blockbuster titles like Batman: Arkham City and Mass Effect 3. In fact, Iribe's also brought over his partner Michael Antonov, who was Scaleform's chief technology officer, and Gaikai just signed a deal to license Scaleform's tech last week. Surprise, surprise: the tablet and TV interfaces I've seen today were built on Scaleform, and the company's also prepping touchscreen controls for its Android app using the tool.
Gaikai engineer David Coles lets me take the rudimentary touchscreen UI for a spin, and while it's not particularly impressive at this early stage — just a virtual D-pad and some buttons — the vision is rather neat: You'll use your tablet as a touchscreen controller for your Gaikai-equipped television, then press a "Takeover" button and transfer the whole session to your tablet screen so you can take your game with you.
nichts spannendes. redet lieber wieder über das thema.
