David Perry and the Infinite Money Loop

It seems like just a few months ago -- wait a minute, it was just a few months ago -- that game designer and serial futurist David Perry was at the DICE show talking about massively multiplayer community-driven micropayment browser games. And now he's talking up an OnLive-style streaming games service called Gaikai?

Maybe I'm just still a little mad at Perry, having just replayed that obnoxious fifth level of Aladdin for Genesis a few weeks ago, but it's getting all a bit too Billy Mays, isn't it? First he's talking up Kaboom, then Oxi-Clean. Well, which is the miracle product?

Also, I feel like this particular exchange with Edge Online gets into if-it-sounds-too-good-to-be-true-it-probably-is territory:

Imagine Gaikai started with just one server. That server gives me about 3,500 plays, if you give each person an hour, on five or six instances per server, per month. So Activision comes along and says, "I'd like to buy 5,000 people, please". They just took up my whole server. Immediately we need more servers, so we’ll buy another. ... Here’s the twist with ours: whenever the demand is (down) – say Activision goes away – there's always going to be somebody who wants to pay rock bottom: They'll be ready to come in when Activision leaves, so the servers will sit at 100 percent capacity all the time.

So what Perry is saying here is that this cannot possibly fail. There will be an infinite, unlimited supply of money and customers. Next on the list: perpetual motion machine!

Interview: David Perry's Gaikai [Edge Online]