Added on September 30, 2009  Alan Smithee  Cloud Computing , Dave Perry , Gaikai , onlive , PC

Place Your Bets: Gaikai or OnLive?

Ive been championing Dave Perry’s Gaikai for quite a while now thanks to the fact that it’ll all be done without the need for special controllers or boxes on the user side, unlike OnLive which will require something of the sort.

This week, OnLive’s El Jefe Steve Perlman disclosed to the world that they’ve recently finished taking in approximately $700 million in funding from various investors who are hungry to see what the company can do to transform those investments into dividends.

That’s an awfully large amount of money for a startup company to have as operating capital for an unproven product like Cloud Computing.

In case you were wondering, the $700 million I was speaking about before easily makes OnLive the biggest gaming related investment in 2009…which is saying a lot considering the company has yet to go into open beta or private beta for that matter. The company has even gone so far to say that the launch won’t happen this year at all (a much different tune than what was uttered at E3).

If you’ll remember, I did an article a little while back talking about Dave Perry’s business model for Gaikai and I’m feeling more and more like its the proper one for this type of business. Instead of taking the near 1 billion and investing in servers and overhead for what can quickly become a bloated mess (trust me, I know personally).

It won’t be a year or two before the investors of OnLive start to demand a return on their cash injections before people’s heads start rolling, mark my words. I personally think that OnLive will be a novel idea, but is already made obsolete due to Gaikai not needing hardware besides a computer hooked up to the internet. If I’m wrong, expect me to eat those words.

What do you all think? Gaikai or OnLive?