OnLive

    They go on to explain a lot more and showcase more games being played.

    They also tell you towards the end of the video during questions that its a North American market only right now. If you are on the east cost, you cannot play with west coast players until there is a central server location. Overall they have a lot more work ahead of them then they make it seem.

    What I think will be great is if the service works anyone with a mac or an old laptop can play quality games without the hardware normally needed. So its interesting at least to see something like this progress.

    I played Crysis on it briefly at GDC yesterday. However, "played" is a loose term since I only had five minutes and an OnLive rep was talking at me the whole time about the tech, much of which distracted me from playing (with a console controller, not a M/KB). Also, the scene I was in was a semi industrial environment with a fair amount of plants and no enemies shooting back at me...nothing to really shoot at at all and by the end I moved around like 30 feet in the game cause they kept distracting me with information about the potential of the system. Then I had to go to another meeting.

    So it was not a fair test. I saw a ton of video of games but it just didn't feel like it was ready yet. There are a ton of technical things to overcome for mass adoption, not to mention the penetration of truly dependable multiple megabit bandwidth. FFS my Time Warner cable connection has hiccups all the time and I get lag issues in games semi frequently. In a traditional online game like TF2 or WoW you can live with it. I'm not sure if I could live with my single player Crysis or whatever game having hiccups like that.

    I'm pissed I didn't get to see it more, but my opinion right now is: prove it, OnLive, prove it. And even when you prove it, prove it again. And again. Eventually I'm all for it or similar / competing service but I think it's going to be a while before this gets critical mass.

    Oh I think the analysis in this thread is pretty dead on. Woot.

    Its what’s going to happen but its more likely Microsoft will buy them and use there tec and Sony will have something along the same lines or both are working on their own thing.

    If they can shore up the capital to actually launch the service I will be surprised. Assuming they do I predict they would go out of business within 2 years. That's not to say that they are headed in the right direction, but the masses aren't ready for this and the technology isn't in place yet.

    Give it a decade and this will be how games are played. Let's face it, it would benefit the publishers and developers if games were distributed this way... assuming the technology was in place to effectively deliver it there wouldn't be many downsides to the consumer.

    This is not something I necessarily look forward to as I like to feel like I 'own' the game instead of just a license to play it, but I am not going to deny the fact that things are going to head in this direction whether we like it or not so we might as well learn to like it.

    Interestingly, by the end of GDC my simultaneous amazement and skepticism gave way to the belief that most likely the owners were looking to sell the company to a larger entity. Bottom line, it's going to take a HUGE capital investment to make this a reality and it will still take years, so why not cash out now and use GDC to generate press and fan investor interest?

    Keith Boesky has a very detailed blog post about the likelihood of an OnLive buyout at http://boesky.blogspot.com/2009/04/onli ... ition.html. He doesn't claim to understand the tech and isn't analyzing that part, but it's a great post on the business perspective of OnLive.

    Thanks for posting that Jeremy, I was waiting for a post like this. Yes the bewilderment is natural to have for all gamers, but it was the business side of it all that had me more interested.

    And the hardware industry lobby?

    How they will react to it?

    I didn´t see many people talking about here but it´s a part of the problem...

    I'd imagine they'll be fine. You're still going to need thousands upon thousands of pieces of hardware — you pretty much need the equivalent of one current-day top-end PC for each person using the service.

    They would probably be forced to look into a more cloud-based solution for stuff like GPUs and whatnot, but if anyone's going to specialise in that it'll be the current giants like NVIDIA as nobody can touch then in the graphics processing department.

    Quote from Hourences

    And in 30 years in Belgium. 25 GB a month traffic cap \o\

    Depends on your provider, I have scarlet adls2, its cheap and unlimited. My record is somewhere at 250 gb for a month.

    Ontopic,

    Not looking forward to these kind of services.

    I want to see this succeed so bad. If only to shake things up in the current 20+ years old distribution model of our industry. AC2 came out recently and it sold well so I'm happy with it, but I still hate to see used copies being sold 5 bucks off the retail price and I don't see a freaking dime on it. Yes customers should be able to resell whatever they bought, but the current model feels like I'm getting robbed every time.

    On a personal level regarding gaming, I can't tell you the number of times I've walked into a store and came out empty handed because I felt the prices were atrocious. There are maybe 3-4 games a year that deserve a 60 dollars price tag, if that. I was happy to get Arkham Asylum for 40 bucks on release day, and felt like it gave me 40 bucks worth of entertainment (I loved it). These days it's back up at 65 dollars and it's 4 months old already. Borderlands was 40 bucks when it launched too, and it's jacked up to 70 now.

    Screw this, Steam is getting so much more of my money by pricing things right (most of the time). I want OnLive to become my Steam on my TV (that I don't have yet) so I can have a console service that feels as good as my pc service.

    Quote from Buddy

    Selling used cars should be illegal, too.

    Irrelevant example. A car is an object that degrades and loses value over time. New "copies" so to speak have an inherent advantage over those sold used. No one is going to buy back a used car for 25% of the original cost and then sell it right back to someone for 95% of the original sticker price, and it's not uncommon for the automaker to be directly involved in this process.

    Used game sales are selling the exact same product at the exact same quality, and being used as competition against developers' own product. GameStop is the #1 game retailer in the US, and they make something around 50% of their profit competing directly with the people who depend on them to sell their product. In what other business does your #1 retailer put your product on the shelf, then actively talk people out of buying them in favor of the $5 cheaper (and $20 more profitable) used copy? It's a horrible arrangement, and unlike other forms of entertainment there's no other secondary market like a theater, live shows, etc. to offset it.

    If those shelf copies they talk people out of don't get bought and enter the used cycle, they get shipped back to the publisher, and the money for each of those copies comes straight out of the developer's pockets. I think there's fair reason to be upset about it.

    It's not that no one should be able to sell a game off when they're done with it, it's that our supposed "#1 partner" is raking in billions in profits and hanging us out to dry. That's a problem that needs fixing.

    That said, I'm going to call that OnLive is years off from being in any way viable, if it ever is. Hardware and bandwidth to pull this off is ridiculous, and I highly doubt latency will be at acceptable levels when you're also seeing significant input lag. Word is their stream is pretty terribly compressed at the moment right now.

    Steam, XBLM, and PSN-style digitial distribution where you download a local copy is going to stay the best online distro for games for the foreseeable future.

    It's amazing how far a solution can go for a problem that doesn't exist. I built a gaming computer 2 years ago for $800 that can run almost every game out at max settings. If I really needed top of the line I could drop $400 on a new graphics card that would resolve any technology bottleneck. If we're talking about a laptop then what's the point? With power consumption and latency you would need a network and power cable all the time. This is of course assuming their idea isn't just marketing BS, which it probably is.

    Anyone who has ever used remote desktop software like say VNC or LOGMEIN stopped and said "holy shit, I wonder if I can run games on my gaming PC and control them from my laptop" only to discover that no, they can't. Any technology that OnLive has "created", proprietary or otherwise, would be such a revolutionary step in broadband technology that it would have been publicly known forever. No matter how great their technology is it can't get around the physical limitations of the cable running from my house to the telephone pole.

    The only thing that would make any sense is using this "technology" to put q3/hl1 era games on netbook type computers. Someone with too much money owned a slingbox, liked to play video games and dropped probably millions on a very lazy concept.

    Quote from KungFuSquirrel

    Irrelevant example. A car is an object that degrades and loses value over time.

    Games degrade too over time if you ask me, issues supporting the newer OS,

    Degrading graphics, and better cooler games comming out (wel once in a while anyway).

    But I guess its easyer to trade with used games then used cars

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!

Register Yourself Login