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Gaikai and OnLive: Casual or Hardcore?

"What struck me about the presentation was that there was absolutely nothing unbelievable in it whatsoever... there was nothing here to suggest that we were looking at a technological breakthrough that would make our PS3s and Xbox 360s obsolete... just that this was a brand new way to play games in an ultra-accessible manner." (Slashdot)

Gaikai and OnLive are cloud gaming services you might already have heard of since E3 (their idea is to render games at central server-farms, enabling games to be played on almost any hardware as a video streamed from the cloud).

After a recently released video demoing Gaikai, the whole discussion about cloud gaming and the healthy dose of scepticism both services have been receiving kept boiling up again—with the terms “convenience” and “play games in an ultra-accessible manner” used frequently. This is typically the vocab of casual gaming, which made me wonder what the target market of OnLive and Gaikai really is; is it casual or hardcore-gamers? Would it attract a new audience, since playing in your browser is such a low entry barrier?

Personally, I think that Gaikai is great way to offer game-demos (instead of your typical 1+GB download), otherwise I see both Gaikai and OnLive targeting the ultra-harcore rather than casual gamers, mainly because of the inevitable costs involved. In case of OnLive, you are going to pay the bill on-spot, probably as a subscription (I’d say they will offer different pricings blocked by video-quality, i.e. “play in a resolution of 800*600 for xx$ per month, or choose HD-quality for xxx$“). Gaikai offers its services to publishers, so you would be billed at each publisher individually.
I think there is definitely going to be a demand for that (“pay xx bucks on top of your regular WoW-subscription and you will be able to play it anywhere, anytime you’ve got internet-connection”), but I don’t see this coming from the field of casual gamers, it seems to be much more geared toward hardcore-gamers, who could use this opportunity for recurring tasks like crafting and auctions. In case of MMOs or any other game which involves an account, another obstacle would be to hand over your log-in credentials to either Gaikai or OnLive, which might be just too much nuisance for the casual type of gamer.

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