If you don’t follow gaming news, this may have slipped by you, but trust me when I tell you that it’ll blow up everywhere in a day or two.
OnLive is basically a platform for playing a game that sits on a remote server, streaming the video to you over the internet. It sounds fantastic, awesome, revolutionary in a big way, and entirely implausible. At first I dismissed it, but the more I hear about it, the more I believe in it. Unless Sony and Microsoft manage to cock-block it, it’ll absolutely change the gaming industry.
If you’re even remotely interested in games, you owe it to yourself to check out the press conference video.
If this works — and that’s a big if, mind you — you’ll virtually never have to worry about upgrading your console again, because everything is run server-side. Games will be cheaper, faster delivered and you can’t lose or scratch the disc! As a developer, depending on how the OnLive business model will end up working, we also are no longer shackled by system specs. Piracy goes out the window. Noisy or defective components? Not a problem. And it works on your TV, your PC or your Mac! You can literally be playing on the TV, the wife comes in to watch Oprah, and you just flip up your MacBook and continue! The implications are absolutely mind boggling. And that’s just games; how about on-demand films and TV?
This is a game changer, pun and all.
Amazing presentation! And what stamina those guys have… 7 years?
It strikes me that their platform is also ideal for render-farming. As far as I understand the biggest bummer for any 3d work is waiting time with rendering – since OnLive’s has the hardware and their video encryption is so strong, wouldn’t it be a natural step for them to provide computer cycles to developers?
Well, there’s nothing stopping them from doing that, but the video encryption doesn’t play a role in that, except if you want stuff previsualized faster; after all you don’t want the next Pixar film to feature lossy compression, do you?
I’m guessing there are just as good, probably better render-farm solutions out there.
This really is a strong contender for next paradigm in video games.
It sounds brilliant, but I really have a time believing it could ever work for timing-critical game genres like first person shooters.
Even with massive increase in bandwidth, there’s still a problematic latency issue.
Also, I can’t imagine streaming properly high res content will be fast enough time soon.
That said, if it works, I agree – it changes everything.
this is a sweet idea– how much data are we talking per game session? bandwidth-wise there could be some problems. (sorry, haven’t had a chance to watch the clip, i’m ‘working’).
next it’ll be your iTunes Store purchases stored externally (on their servers) ready for consumption on your muti-Apple-authorised devices (pff, and authorised headphones) with the swish of a wifi bar and the click of a well crafted round-cornered button. While they’re at it, wouldn’t it be cool if when you walk in the door (music playing on yer iPod) and you decide to plug the iPod into the dock / cable — wouldn’t it be bloody awesome if instantly the computer recognised that you were enjoying that song and continued to play it (now through iTunes). They could even work it into some wifi related / system where iTunes ‘senses’ you’re nearby and sync’s up…. did that make any sense?
It’s called Napster. It’s been around for ages …
I want to believe.
Not only because I’ll be able to run Crysis on a netbook, but because of all the other things; because I’ll have less hardware that needs less updating. Because it’ll quite possibly run a plethora of other games that are hard to set up, DOS classics, odd C64 games, Bomb Jack arcade. This, I want to pay for.
Like Joen, I want to believe.
I also know that latency is a product killer. WoW is a problem throughout the Pacfic Rim, because all Australians (for example) must use a US based server.
We already have this in part. It’s called MMORG, and many such clients are literally now just a console for a partly pre-rendered feed.
The problem with this kind of technology has never been speed (it’s been scaling up since dialup for years) – it’s latency. And FPS genre games will be next to impossible to play under this model unless render/ game farms are geographically close.
You’re either talking in the abstract, or about a MMORPG I don’t know.
Absolutely true. But at the same time, if this is the future model for games, then like in multiplayer games, latency will be dealt with in the games themselves (or possibly OnLive will develop plugin network code to help the problem). It can’t possibly be entirely removed, and it’s likely to be a problem in areas. In fact, you’ll hear so much geek whine and hate over this that it’ll no doubt drown out all the good experiences.
Everybody talks about the FPS as if it was the only genre that counts; personally I think it should’ve been left to die in the 90’s, but that’s just me :)
Fair comments.
My point, in short, is that I find the entire notion exciting. And I really, really want this to work.
But the little man on my shoulder tells me that there are laws of physics involved within networking that mean it’s not possible to “fix” latency without geographically close farms.
FPS may not be the only genre, but it is one that (still) counts strongly.
Well they have said that the hubs will have to be geographically close.
So, with this, the only way to play the game I’ve purchased is to have constant internet connectivity? Sucks if you need to travel and want to play the game on your laptop on the plane.
How are they going to deal with streaming what is essentially losslessly-compressed HD video? If the compression isn’t lossless, they’re going to lose a lot of people. Is that an enemy in the distance, or a compression artifact?
Seems like a lot of potential pitfalls just for some buzzwords. Paradigm shift! Cloud computing! Blah blah blah
/crotchety old man
Yeah, it’s compressed. At either 640×480 or 1280×720. :(
Hopefully the barriers to entry won’t be so high that small or indie devs will be left out in the cold.
And I do hope that this works out and isn’t just smoke and mirrors.