Walmart Shoppers, Meet The Stream

The world’s largest retail chain has joined forces with Gaikai to offer streaming PC titles through Walmart.com. Say you’re at home. You’re bored. You need something new to play. You’d like to pick up the latest shooter, but that would involve finding pants, driving to the store, and missing the last ten minutes of Mansquito.

This is the first paragraph of an article found on Escapist magazine. It contains some interesting insights that fit the consumer and business insights focus of our blog. The article continues …

What a dilemma!

Luckily, Walmart has the answer. The retail giant has inked a deal with Gaikai to bring the latter’s “open cloud gaming platform” to the website of the former. Translation: Gamers, even those with low-end PCs, will be able to stream playable titles directly from the retailer’s site.

VentureBeat broadly explains:

With streamed games, the actual game runs in Gaikai’s servers in the internet cloud, or web-connected data centers. Changes to the game are executed on the servers and then sent over broadband connections to a user’s computer. That way, it isn’t necessary to do any computing on the user’s machine, except displaying the images on the screen. The heavy-duty processing is done by the servers. That allows users to play games on web sites and use hardware that wouldn’t ordinarily be able to run game as a client-based title.

The idea, it seems, is to compete directly with OnLive, the popular streaming games service whose name has become synonymous with the cloud gaming concept since its debut in June of 2010.

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Read full article on Escapist magazine