Gaikai's Facebook Fail: Hardly Anyone's Playing "Real Games" through the Cloud-Based Service's Facebook Portal

I just noticed something notable about Gaikai's new Facebook portal, which as I blogged about in April when it launched in open beta, uses the service's cloud deployment technology to stream AAA, high quality 3D games into the social network:

Hardly anyone's using it. Just 9,000 monthly users, to be exact. This despite a launch that was widely covered on many of the top tech blogs, and what you'd think would be a pretty killer offer: Play console games (or what Gaikai called "real games" in its announcement) on Facebook -- for free! But for one reason or another, few seem excited to do so. It's possible the company throttled the open beta, but I haven't seen any announcements to that effect. Until I see otherwise, I'm thinking the reason for this failure to grow is related to what I discussed back in April:

Facebook games are designed to optimally work on the platform, with short gameplay sessions and 2D graphics that allow for quick breaks while multitasking. While Gaikai's sure to get some extra traffic from the Facebook deployment, I think they'll also discover their AAA games won't be able to compete with casual Facebook hits like Draw Something or Tetris Battle -- also real games, in fact, but really made to work with Facebook, not against it.

But they did get extra traffic, as it turns out -- all 9,000 of it.

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Comments

[Chance]

In before Over 9000.

[Frans]

I hadn't tried it yet, until now. Looks like you can only play a handful of demos, which is not that exciting. Secondly, probably to do with my location, I can't play anything as I get the following error:
"Your network appears to have significant packet loss at this time. Please try again."

[Pussycat Catnap]

Facebook is not of major value to many businesses that invest heavily in being on it.

A lot of people have 'tossed out the website' in favor of a Facebook, mySpace, etc page...
- But just as people don't really buy ads on Facebook, they don't use it to relate to brands either.

Facebook is for 'liking' pics of people getting drunk, pics of people being over flirty while way too young, updates about what you just put in the microwave, and other low value 'non-commercial spam'.

Its going to collapse in upon itself in time as the realization of this grows.

[Ezra]

The Facebook app is just game demos. Not full games.

They do still have full games listed as "coming soon", but there's no reason to expect Gaikai to get any better a deal from publishers than OnLive for full games. Meaning Gaikai will only be able to offer a very small selection of years old games.

Facebook not being a good medium for console-style games is true, but first and foremost Gaikai fails at actually delivering any games.

[Iggy]

@Pussycat, may I call you on a sweeping generalization?

"Facebook is for 'liking' pics of people getting drunk, pics of people being over flirty while way too young,"

That may have been the typical profile in Facebook in, say, 2006. Now it's more about "what you just put in the microwave" and even my students are less "into" FB than they were a few years back. My sister posts pictures of the grandkids, my 70-something cousin shares prayers, and my wife trades gardening ideas with friends. I re-post NYT op-eds and, on occasion, NWN stories.

This ain't the Harvard FB of yore...like SL, it's morphed as surely as a once-hip urban hood going mainstream when the Gap moves into the old location of the locally owned record store.

So FB has lost the sort of "cool" you parody. It's a social tool for the masses, and mostly, about as boring but useful as e-mail.

Given the coming of bandwidth taxing by ISPs like Comcast, one wonders at all about the fate of content like Gaikai's...or Linden Lab's.

[Ferd Frederix]

If its an app, I just block it. I tried advertising on it (once). I have to agree with Iggy. FB is just another place to hang out a few minutes to see what my virtual friends are up to.

[Pussycat Catnap]

@Iggy: You just agreed with me. How is that calling me on a generalization if you just took mine and expanded it out to more of what I said? :)

[Pussycat Catnap]

bandwidth taxing though yeah - that's going to slam shut a lot of the current internet if those corps get away with that 1%er funnel.

You can cap bandwidth in Oz or NZ and the rest of the world won't notice. But do it in the USA, and you shut down a lot of major content and innovation.