OnLive

More so than the developing structure that is going to change, it's certainly set to revolutionize the industry.

From a consumer standpoint, this means you can access ALL games regardless of your owning whichever platform the game is exclusive to. You can also rent and buy games even faster than now, much like you can with movies.

From a retailer standpoint, it is a huge direct competitor, one that you will have to fight very hard against

From a publisher standpoint, and that's where most of the revolution comes, it basically changes the repartition of the purchasing cost for the final product. Currently publishers pay royalties to system manufacturers, and it's up in the air who would have to pay that now, but if OnLive needs to take care of it then the price will only be paid by the end consumer, not the publisher. Even more so, the cut brick and mortar retail takes from your game simply changes to OnLive instead, so that's another question.

OnLive is going to reveal its pricing scheme at GDC in March.

And doesnt this mean the end of consoles and the return of pc ?

No because you can bet console manufacturers will continue to make sure they have game exclusives. Only Onlive will have to buy the hardware, you won't.

Even if OnLive worked perfectly I'd still vastly prefer local games instead of streamed ones, for pretty much the exact reasons people are up in arms over the new Ubi DRM thing.

Quote from Nysuatro

And doesnt this mean the end of consoles and the return of pc ?

They could easily release a onlive console version if you ask me.

yes and that'd be most probably the only good thing they could do. still i have alot of doubt in the whole concept (as long as we don't get a much faster and more reliable internet connection).

That looks so expensive. But I got to say. It works smooth as far as I can see.

one of my students played it, and i gotta say it looked smooth. especially so because he was playing it on an old machine that could not possibly run any games otherwise.

Quote from Nysuatro

That looks so expensive. But I got to say. It works smooth as far as I can see.

You don't have to pay per month anymore actually...free (apart from the games you buy)!

That's rather nice!

I wouldn't get convinced by one guy's experience alone. For example, I've got a 30Mbps fiber line, and I live just outside a major American city. Trying to play Splinter Cell Conviction is unbearable due to the control lag. At least a second average time between moving the mouse and your aim moving to follow it. Makes shooting people who aren't standing still impossible. I just tried it again after seeing that video review and it has not improved since OnLive first went open beta (I got in pretty quickly). Other games run somewhat better, but look far worse, for example RFG has all the shadows and shaders turned off.

It's such a brilliant concept in theory, but those old concerns raised from the outset are unfortunately still there: any kind of network latency and/or downtime is catastrophic, the video quality can be awful if your connection isn't speedy, and the game doesn't look as good as it would with your own hardware as they mandate turning off higher settings (including anti-aliasing).

I know for a fact that despite living in the absolute centre of a city, due to connection quality being so variable here I couldn't play games properly just like I can have issues with online video streaming if anyone else tries to use the connection.

There's also some fairly damning stuff summarised by Wikipedia:

Quote

DigitalFoundry conducted tests on OnLive that showed latency was greater than that for a locally-installed game. Best-case response times for button press to action was 10 frames or 150 ms, while other games ranged from 150 ms to 210 ms, and they noted that this would vary greatly depending on quality of connection to OnLive's servers. They also noted that such a response time "never meets anything like the claims made for it by company front-man Steve Perlman, on the record as describing end-to-end lag as being under 80 ms and 'usually... between 35-40 ms'.", and that while this may not be a problem for slower-paced games, for faster-paced games, "it is most definitely not a replacement for the local experience".Video quality was also analyzed with the finding that, owing to the use of video compression, "video quality is hugely variable in OnLive, ranging from very good to absolutely, diabolically dreadful. You will never get that disparity of performance on a local system", with video quality best when there was little motion or change in picture. Framerate and graphics quality was generally good, being comparable to the console versions of the games offered, but DigitalFoundry noted screen tearing due to the unlocked frame rate and the lack of full-screen anti-aliasing as mentioned by the developer briefing at GDC as being "mandatory".

In examining the value of the OnLive system, they noted that physical copies of games were often cheaper than those for use on OnLive, that OnLive's promise of better graphics quality than consoles counted for nothing if latency and video quality were inconsistent, and that the performance level could be "approximated or even exceeded" by purchasing an £80 graphics card bought for a computer that meets the minimum specification to use OnLive on a PC.

If connection speeds were extremely stable and extremely fast across the board it'd be fantastic, but until then it's just less hassle and cheaper to go with traditional console gaming and even PC gaming.

Indeed. Not to mention if you live in the US you don't have a good internet connection, at least it's standard practice here to throttle everything to half or less of what you paid for and then to further throttle it based on what it does. This is probably why they have a contract with ATT: ATT runs alot of the fiber backbone and could "improve" the latency of the service by NOT throttling it

Quote from Mr. Happy

Indeed. Not to mention if you live in the US you don't have a good internet connection, at least it's standard practice here to throttle everything to half or less of what you paid for and then to further throttle it based on what it does. This is probably why they have a contract with ATT: ATT runs alot of the fiber backbone and could "improve" the latency of the service by NOT throttling it

Maybe that's how AT&T does it. Verizon doesn't throttle FiOS bandwidth any lower than the package you purchase. People just don't know the difference between Megabit and Megabyte.

Yes...I'm bumping this thread. Why? You probably already know why:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2 ... off-report

http://kotaku.com/5935767/onlive-filing ... -its-place

http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/17/break ... ors-today/

Quote from VentureBeat

[uPDATE 3: Endgadget reports that OnLive has laid off "at least 50 percent of the staff, according to our source's numbers." It also reports that the layoffs are a "move that apparently comes as OnLive is being purchased by an unknown party. Those being kept on have reportedly received offer letters from the new company."Our own Dean Takahashi is on the scene at OnLive's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters to learn more about the happenings. Dean's report: Employees are still walking out, but they aren't talking much.]

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/17/break ... M06gwFI.99

Oh... I never saw this coming.

I totally saw the acquisition by a third party coming. Gaikai was the most successful at getting to that stage, and that was always the end game for all these cloud gaming companies. They don't have anything substantial to keep on going as single entities, they're just tech providers with limited added value from a commercial perspective. So every single one of them will get bought or perish.

Now that Sony has Gaikai, Onlive was going to get picked up. I suspect the clean slate is only part of the acquisition process as the interested party had no interest in keeping the employees around.

I just hope all the people (like my friend) who invested in the hardware, etc don't get left hanging.

They are totally left hanging, and this whole take over is a lot more shady than it might appear from what I am hearing. This move allows them to retain the tech and ip and such, while getting rid of employees stock options and so on. Or at least that is what I am picking up here and there.