The news of this OnLive ‘thing’ appeared on all the gaming news sites this morning (google it). It’s essentially “a new service that will stream PC games with negligible lag to televisions and PCs, eliminating the need for hardware upgrades”.  It’s essentially remote desktop gaming. The overall concept is intriguing. It nearly removes the necessity to continually upgrade PC hardware or even go out and buy a new console. You won’t have to go out and buy games anymore either. It can hook up to your TV in HDMI or stream right through your monitor.  You can use a keyboard, mouse, game controller, whatever. Intriguing, but I’m just not sold yet.
My internet connection, a 10mb connection from AT&T, is great but not infallible. I lose my connection several times a week to hiccups or for reasons beyond my understanding. What happens when Graev is playing a console game and hasn’t saved in a while? Heck, how do you save? Are save files saved on their servers or on your PC or on this little usb dongle? The “1 millisecond latency” they boast is probably legit, so I won’t offer up too much concern about the lag.  I’m also curious about MMORPGs.  I’m not even sure if it’s possible to offer them this way through a 3rd party provider.
I like physically owning most of my stuff. Is that an archaic way of thinking now? I’m sure in 50 years I’ll be sitting in a rocking chair telling my grandchildren about the days where we actually had to put a CD in the computer, just to have them mock me while playing their mmorpgs on nano-brain implants that they access just by thought. Resisting something like this is probably silly because, if it works perfectly, it will be one of those giant leaps for the gaming industry. I still can’t help the urge to stack boxes in the corner of my room though… I can see my original StarCraft, Warcraft II, Netstorm, Diablo, Kings Quest, etc, boxes and know that I can still feel attached to them. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get that same feeling with a monthly subscription to a claim in digital cyberspace.
Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Take-Two, Eidos, and Atari are all in from what I’ve read. Activision Blizzard might resist, which wouldn’t surprise me, because they probably don’t want their 800lb gorilla compressed and piped out through a 3rd party (if possible) when they are likely planning the same thing already.  Should be interesting to see how many “me too’s” we’ll see over the next few months.
Issues with saved games, disconnects, lag, how long they’ll support and offer a game (we like to go back and play old games) and just how much this “subscription” will cost me are on the top of my need-to-know’s before I give this a serious thought. Now get off my lawn, I have some gaming boxes to stack.
The 1ms latency would be very impressive. I don’t know how they plan on doing it, as it isn’t up to them. Unless they are going to put servers pretty close to everyone’s house. To my ISP’s DNS server is is 23ms.
Sounds a bit like the Sega Genesis game download system that was introduced in… ’96 maybe? you hooked up this clunky adapter into the cable system and jammed it into the game port… It was all too new for such an outdated system.
btw, I love original ideas..
I read that they are working with ISP’s to accomplish this. Europe will have 100-150mb connections here soon. Some really cool things are being accomplished with technology lately which is why I won’t be at all surprised if the 1ms response time is doable.
Geez – thought you and graeve were canadians : p
American’s actually. Poor wording on my part above saying “Europe” and “here” together. Europe will have 100-150mb connections.
I would imagine the disconnect issue an easy fix. I assume you’ll log in and out much the same you would a remote desktop connection. Basically if you get disco’ed it could really keep your session active until you are able to log back in or a time limit is reached and it logs you out.
Sounds interesting enough, I’m leary of the lag thing though myself. Trying to pipe all the graphics on top of all the other traffic online games produce is just going to increase lag. We’ll see I suppose, I know I’m still with you on the nostalgia thing. Though I don’t have my King’s Quest box anymore. 😉
Japan already has like 80mb connections doesn’t it?
I feel like an ass. I thought of this idea 15 years ago and wanted to patent it. Everyone thought I was crazy a idiot, so I dropped the idea out of embarrassment.
I’m so pissed at myself right now, I want to punch a hole in the wall.
“Europe” has had 100mbit for years, but by that I mean Sweden and Norway has 😛
Prob some more but I just don’t know.
Regarding Onlive, if it works, and if they get MMO’s (WAR in my case) on it then I’m sold and will subscribe. I’m as attached to my computer as I am to the socks I wear and will gladly subscribe to a service that will save me lots of money on hardware upgrades every year. And lest not forget, also a service that will finally let me buy a Mac and play PC games on it! And not only that, but play PS3 and Xbox 360 games on my Mac. Hallelujah! If it works, I’m sold, SO sold!
I completely ignored the headlines I’d seen about this service up ’til now, assuming it was some sort of scam or vaporware that would never work well enough to be worthwhile… I guess I was premature?
Technology is amazing and all, but I can’t see any situation where they’re going to get latency low enough, and bandwidth high enough, to replicate the experience of playing a locally running client at 1600×1200 resolution or higher. Netflix struggles to get enough video through my internet tubes to maintain 400X600 resolution on a movie, and I don’t stand to die in game if it decides it needs to buffer…
Either way, I see the solution to the cost of PC upgrades… being to upgrade less frequently. Most people don’t need to run Crysis at max everything, they just like saying they own a rig that will do so, and this service isn’t going to be very attractive for them. Mac users (I was one for a long time) I have more sympathy for, but I’ll still hold off on believing this service is going to be livable until average gamers have used it and say it is.
I am with Sisyphean. Maybe they just want some guys to buy their stocks… 🙂
It might work, but till I have seen and done it, I am sceptical.
I just wonder about the custom high-performance game servers, I guess games would have to be developed directly to this system.
I too highly doubt the 1ms latency… just doesn’t seem feasible at the moment. Also, remember line speed isn’t the only factor that determines speed – you have to take into account contention ratio too. For example, BT in the UK have a contention ratio of something like 25:1 – this means that up to 25 people will be sharing your 10mb broadband line 🙂
“1 millisecond latency†is nonsense for an internet service. Light only travels 300 km in 1 ms.
Honestly, if that’s an actual claim of the service, then the whole thing is snake oil.
From what I read elsewhere, the 1 millisecond latency claim is for the video compression portion only. That is itself rather impressive if the video is decent quality.
I think this service will have some impressive demos with servers connected by fast local networks, but will fail for the vast majority of its target audience. (Those who buy high-bandwidth broadband can usually easily afford one or more good gaming systems.)
Meaningless to people in Backward countries like myself (Australia), most ppl are on adsl2, which varies depending on your distance from the telephone exchange, plus all Australian ISPs have download quotas so this would chew through that quota pretty. My Country’s 3rd world status aside. What happens when multiple people in you house want this system, or are using your internet for other hi-usuage things, like watching download movies, etc. What happens when your internet is down, or their service is down, or there are problems with routers between you and this service provider? MMOs/Online games you currently have to worry about these things, but when they’re down you can fall back to your single player games, but with this you’ve got nothing (well except the option to go to the outside world and get some fresh air and exercise, but who wants that?).
I don’t think you’re old-fashioned, archaic or obsolete for wanting to physically own stuff. A backlash will eventually be inevitable on some of this ‘cloud’ computing, when they take it so far as to put the entire product into the cloud and customers get more and more often screwed.
I also don’t think OnLive will fly very high, not at first at least. They have an uphill battle of trust to win over first. Especially considering how popular Steam is already.
Rohan and others are right, the latency claims are just silly rhetoric trying to separate themselves from other digital distribution methods. Streaming instead of downloading honestly won’t be that big of a deal unless it: A. Works flawlessly with every game. Yeah right.
B. Provides other value aside from just streaming.
This to me seems like someone figured they could squeeze the Netflix model into the games industry. The equation is flawed because they forgot to calculate the existing digital distribution systems with loyal customers.
@Sean: It’s hardly a new or unique idea, this sort of thing was being hyped by the likes of Larry Ellison decades ago. I’m sure there were already hundreds of network-stream-computing patents more than 20 years ago, let alone 15.
Sorry to burst your bubble. Implementation and user-acceptance have been what’s taken so long, but now it’s turned around and almost a fad. You’d need more than a patent or two, it’d take a whole portfolio to leverage on this one.
This OnLive thing looks fantastic if it works. Video cards and console manufacturers should be very worried about this. I am very pleased about the idea of not having to upgrade my hardware every 6 months.
I think this works somewhat like those cable TV boxes. They only transmit the audio/video signals over to your TV (note the HDMI connection), while all the game/graphics processing occurs on their Servers. The controller signals aren’t very big either. Should work fine on most modern internet connections, I think..
@Rog: That actually makes me feel better.
“All your GAMES are belong to us.”
The quality of the info is what keeps me on this site, thanks!