Gaikai: "Targeting 100 million" users "as quickly as we can," says Perry

Gaikai CEO David Perry has said the firm is targeting 100 million users by the end of 2012.

Speaking in an interview with GI.biz, Perry said Gaikai has already passed the 10 million user mark, its previous goal, thanks to affiliates.

"We are targeting 100 million as quickly as we can possibly get there," he said. "We need to get above the reach of any single game entity in the industry a quickly as we can.

"The ability to pull a lever and have a million people play your game is something that's crazy to even think about today. That's a very difficult problem, yet with cloud gaming that will be really quite straight forward. A normal way of thinking will be, 'I want another million and another million'.

"It turns out that the number one way to get people to buy is trying your product, and it's amazing that game trials are being made so difficult."

Perry said the biggest hurdle has been developing a solid infrastructure, which is one of the reasons only demos are being offered at the moment instead of streaming full games.

"We are a company doing this for other people," he said. "If this was just Gaikai and Gaikai has down time that's our problem. But if I'm doing it for Electronic Arts or someone else and it's down, then it's my problem big-time and everyone's going to be calling. If you just paid to play a game and you log in and it's not available for any reason, you're going to get mad.

"We're at a point now where the conversions that we're seeing on the partner sites are way higher than expected so now we want to go to full games. The problem with that is I need to offer Amazon-level 'always up' service time."

Back in July, it was announced that Gaikai had secured another $30 million in funding.