Onlive

[Robin Firedrake]

Read about it here.



Thoughts?

[Shao Feng-Li]

I want.

[mechana2015]

"There's a catch, though. Being an online, streaming service, OnLive is only going to be as good as your Internet connection. High-definition resolutions will require a higher-end broadband connection, and if your service is prone to drop out unexpectedly, you're probably going to wind up frustrated. Even if it works, all that streaming video's going to add up over the months, and heavy users might find themselves the receipient of some unwelcome attention from their ISPs. Modem users, needless to say, need not apply."

So pretty much this will only work well with a FIOS connection, and only if you're plugged into the router. (I've seen streaming HD video lag HEAVILY on a wireless system connected to a really fast network.) Pretty much anything streaming right now has no interest to my since I don't have wired internet of this magnitude anywhere near my computer or TV and I'm going to assume that thats going to be a common case. Heck.. my connection can't keep up with a Skype conference call half the time.

Despite what they say in the review I'm betting they were serving the data to the box in the demo through a LAN from a server within the building, not over the regular internet.

It's a cool tech demo, but rather unlikely to be consumer friendly for a while yet, especially since one of the larger console crowds, college students, either would have to pay for FIOS, (I have a few friends that do, but I couldn't afford it and FIOS isn't quite universally available) or try to run it through the school networks. Having had experience with said networks being locked down for torrenting having filled their bandwith up, I can safely say this device probably won't work in most campus housing for very long.

[blkmage]

This sounds insanely infeasible. They are proposing that they run the game on their servers and stream it to us. Think about the cost to maintain a gaming network like WoW, or Battle.net, or Steam, or Xbox Live. Then think about the cost to do that and do all the work of everyone's PCs or consoles. And how will it scale if it gets popular? It took Blizzard nearly a decade before they could handle the crushing load of a new game release properly.

[Peanut]

Chances are this will crash and burn...and then be ripped off by Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo at some point in the future as the "next big thing."

What blkmage and mechana said pretty much wraps up my opinionos on this. It's not a bad idea, I just don't think the technology is out there for it to work yet...

[Etoh*the*Greato]

It sounded a lot like the Phantom Game console to me except being, you know, not a scam. It's a cool concept and could potentially be technology that is the end of the consoles. In the mean time, I'm gonna hang on to my physical media. I just like it so much more.

[Shiningmonk_e]

It's an interesting concept but I don't think it will do too well (plus, I actually enjoy getting a new release on the first day instead of downloading it). It looks like it could be too complicated for the more casual audience and a lot of the hardcore PC gamers I know torrent the games for free... I think it will end up like the N-Gage.

[Midori]

I guess the reason this is economical is because not everybody will be playing it at once, so you actually need to produce less hardware than if everybody had to buy their own gaming system. Still, if you don't have a blazing fast internet connection, you're gonna see compression artifacts between the zombie and your gun.

[blkmage]

You might produce less aggregate hardware, but you pay for that in how insanely complex such a system would be. It's not trivial at all to try and replicate the power of however many home consoles there are in one giant distributed system.

To me, this does sound like a scam. Just the sheer amount of processing power that would be needed is insane enough. Add to that the complexity of maintaining such a system and trying to make sure that latency isn't an issue.

We don't even have cloud computing for boring stuff figured out yet. Gaming is a way more complex problem.

[Etoh*the*Greato]

It's an interesting concept but I don't think it will do too well (plus, I actually enjoy getting a new release on the first day instead of downloading it). It looks like it could be too complicated for the more casual audience and a lot of the hardcore PC gamers I know torrent the games for free... I think it will end up like the N-Gage.

Or more like The Sega channel.

[Nate]

This will never get off the ground.

The only way this would possibly be useful is if games could be downloaded to your PC. And if that was the case, then big deal, it's just like Steam, hardly a "console killer."

Besides, the important thing is, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft won't sign on to this, and as long as they don't, consoles will never die.

[Etoh*the*Greato]

This will never get off the ground.

The only way this would possibly be useful is if games could be downloaded to your PC. And if that was the case, then big deal, it's just like Steam, hardly a "console killer."

Besides, the important thing is, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft won't sign on to this, and as long as they don't, consoles will never die.

They're streamed to your console, but yeah same problem. It's worked for Quake Live on a much less processor intense scale, so the possibility is certainly there, but we've probably not quite reached that part of the future yet.

[blkmage]

They're streamed to your console, but yeah same problem. It's worked for Quake Live on a much less processor intense scale, so the possibility is certainly there, but we've probably not quite reached that part of the future yet.

It's not quite the same. With Quake Live, the processing is done client-side on your computer, so the only thing that's streamed is the plugin, which is basically the game binaries. The multiplayer then works as normal. This still requires you to have a decent computer.

Onlive wants to do the processing server-side and offers a thin client that would simply stream the processed contents to you where you provide input which sends it back.

Remember that Quake Live is basically Quake III Arena. I don't think it's possible to do what Onlive wants to do even for a ten year old game like this.

EDIT:
And what do you know, there's a Eurogamer article that basically says what I said:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article

[TriezGamer]

Let's not forget that with everything being processed server-side, even small amounts of lag will require your input to reach the server, the server to produce the result, and stream it back to your PC or console. Unless you've got lightning fast (lack of) latency, that's a LOT of delay just for your own personal actions, which would dull response times to anything that's action based and feel REALLY sluggish even for turn-based games. Even 100ms lag would feel really weird if you pull the trigger but fire 1/10 of a second later.

[Nate]

Yeah, this would be hideous for FPS games, racing games, fighting games, or RTS games.

On the other hand, it would work well for turn-based strategy games.

[Etoh*the*Greato]

Of which not many play anymore.