OnLive Coming In June....

Right. I'm just making the point that even in the best case, the lag may be an issue. For anyone outside of that it may not be tolerable. I hope I get picked as a one year free trial though. I really want to see how well it works. I think its usefullness is kind of limited if you need a server within range for a ping less than 5 just to make it controls effective. Any round-trip (server, processing, return, processing) ping >50ms would be highly noticable IMHO.

 

Wow, no thanks...
-You need to pay for the service that ALLOWS you to purchase games and play them provided you are lucky enough to find a time when they aren't lagged into unplayability. One minor internet issue between you and the ONlive servers and you might as well just throw money out the window and have no option to simply find another server.
-Suppose ONlive bills your creit card three times one month and then says you didn't pay... you are cut off and every cent you spent there you have nothing to show for it.
-Suppose ONlive is the subject of an attack... (probably from someone they screwed as above). All its users are screwed.
-Assume ONlive's community will be similar to most console players... I hope you like baby-sitting other people's children...

 

I really hope they are not charging full retail price for games, if so I dont know what they are smoking, or maybe I dont know what anybody dumb enough to get the service is smoking.

If its a cheap monthly service (Say about the same as netflix or similar) and you only have to pay $5-10 to add a game to your library I can see it having some potential customers.

Not me though, its too limiting and I have my all powerful eyefinity rig and G73 for a reason.

 

Rentals make sense to me or even have $5/mo and rent separately or buy games or have $20/mo and get unlimited rentals or something like that. But to spend full retail for a game that goes bye-bye when you let your subscription lapse is stupid.

 

Updated OP with list of games and other interesting info.

 

lolwut
Dual Core CPU? There goes netbooks.
Seriously, OnLive gave hope to netbook users, but now, look what happened. This service is looking to fail. Miserably.

 

Not to mention 720p. Most netbooks are 1024x600. Newer ones are starting to go 1366x768 but still lots of 10" are 1024x600.

 

Lol. This is going to go down horribly.

 

The Onlive service will go under within a year. The upkeep costs of their servers alone won't be covered by the small number of subscribers. And how are they going to recoup, when giving away a free year?

The whole point, for them, is to get bought by a large digital service/cable provider, before they go belly up.

Good luck, to anyone who buys a game through OnLive.

 

Yep. I just want to try it to see how it is. Problem is servers have to be close to users, which means in every major city more or less. Plus at $5/mo while inexpensive, I don't know how they can stay above water. Heck, even NetFlix costs $9/mo and they just stream movies but have millions of subscribers, so only $1 profit per person is significant.

 

htwingnut just answering your other question here, I dont know for sure, just heard off gizmodo ( one of a few sites i can access at work) that said you can sign up. But I read a few other forums all saying they cant sign up.

Unfortunately Ive thought of a few more cons to this through reading other forums, one being your internet goes down in your area, you cant play a thing..... that is complete garbage. Atleast games owned can still be played single player.

This service is doomed from the get go, steam is 10X more appealing then this, and im not particularly a fan of steam either!

 

I have a dell studio 15 n i'm at home most of the time so i wouldn't mind paying for this service for maybe a few games that work terribly on my system... But I cant see how I could enjoy it without lag.. n as most of u said the games have to be much cheaper than retail!

 

so can you only play multiplayer and not single player on onlive??

 

I think them offering 1 free year + games is a brilliant move. Even if some don't win it, it will create exposure and interest in the service. Game site cheapassgamer.com has begun to talk about the one year free offer. That's the best advertisement you can get when selling a service.

Now i'm not talking about those just wanting 1 year of free games and bailing on the service but there are many members on that site that are looking for a Steam alternative to play games at a low cost.

 

I just got selected for the one free year. I really don't want to invest much money in it, but I'll give my review time permitting. At minimum give you my thoughts.

Well initial thoughts are that even though this is a $60 perk, they should give you at least one free game, or enough money for a couple months rentals, however it works.

 

Congrats

Let us know:

1) Selection of Games
2) Quality of Service
3) Performance of games on your computer and what we might expect
4) Does it play in a browser or their proprietary interface

 

Well, I can answer questions 1 and 4 right now.
1. Featured Games
4. It's a proprietary application.

Performance will be 100% dependent on their hardware and your internet connection, provided you have the hardware to render 720i Flash-style video (so basically, any computer from the past 3-4 years or so).

 

Ok, just had about 30 minutes with the service. Here's my regurgitation of what I just expereinced.

It has a nice and simple interface, easy to get around. They use their own proprietary application, but can be launched from a desktop icon or through their website. Installation was quick and painless. Pretty much all games have a demo, appears to be timed. I tried Borderlands, gives you 30 minutes, of course first fifteen or more are the intro and choosing your character, and basic training. You can't save your progress in the demo though. No biggie.

I tried to play on my notebook which only has a wifi connection, and it yelled at me that it doesn't support wi-fi. So not only is it not supoprted, it won't let you run it just to give it a whirl. So I ran it on my slower desktop: Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3.0GHz, ATi Radeon HD 4670, 4GB DDR2

I have an older Athlon 64 X2 system I am going to try it on later and see how it fares: Athlon 64 X2 3200+, 8600 GS, 2GB DDR

The way the pricing works for most that I've seen is a 3 day pass, 5 day pass, and Full PlayPass. Full PlayPass pricing seems similar to retail full game. Here's an image of what you get:



For the Full PlayPass I've seen it's valid through some date in 2013, although it does say "at least until".

Here's a list of games currently available:

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAAaAAAA!!!
Assassin's Creed II
Batman Arkham Asylum
Borderlands
Brain Challenge
Defense Grid Gold
DiRT 2
F.E.A.R. 2
Just Cause 2
LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4
Madballs in Babo: Invasion
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
Puzzle Chronicles
Red Faction: Guerrilla
Shatter
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Conviction
Trine
Unreal Tournament III: Titan Pack
World of Goo

You can play the game either in a window at 1280x720 or full screen. You can release your mouse to the desktop with Alt-O but kind of annoying because it pauses the game. So you can't do something else when a cutscene, like the intro to Borderlands, is taking place. I found doing a Ctrl-Shift-Esc gives you mouse control back though.

So far I've only played Borderlands. There is definite mouse lag. They do support an X360 controller though, and probably would work best with a setup like this since lag wouldn't be as noticeable as a mouse. Plus I don't know what was doing it, but the feeling in the game either windowed or full screen was making me a bit naseaus. I don't know if it was the frame rate, the delay in movement, or what, but it was getting hard to play without feeling a bit woozy. I'm sure it may just be a personal thing. I'll try more gaming and see.

I will give DiRT 2 a try because there I feel control responsiveness is most important, and if lag is a factor.

Overall, the image looked pretty decent. But it still felt like a streaming mpeg instead of real time GPU pushing. Maybe that's what was making me a little woozy. I dunno.

That's all for now. Will update more later.

 

Well, like the post above in reality is a 1 free year offer. You pay for the games.

 

Bah, wifi not even supported. There goes my interest in this service.

 

Wow, Borderlands runs on low settings:



Uuuuugly. I've noticed that Defense Grid does as well.

 

Hmmm, didn't realize that. Does it make you feel a bit nauseous as well when playing? If they can't offer higher settings, it doesn't make much sense.

I mean heck you can buy a Shuttle desktop with Core 2 Duo, HD 4670, 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD, DVDRW, and Win7 for under $500.

 

Yuck, thats super low res for textures, theres like no detail in that at all, might aswell run on a ps2.
Its either low res or its due to uncompression from the net in the form of "fussy" artifacts, either way..... EWWWW. and the worst part would be if you played on a big screen everything would be way more noticable.

 

So I loaded up my Steam copy, to take a comparison picture...

Yep, looks about the same:


Settings?


Everything is either OFF or on LOW.

How will they handle it, when there's a few hundred thousand people trying to play, simultaneously?

 

Honestly I think Onlive takes a 640x480 image and renders it to a 720p size -- much like taking a 480p image and stretching it too 1080p -- with all low settings of course.

 

Where I can see this being successful is if a cable TV company offered it as a service to play on your TV. Because really it is a competitor to the consoles as opposed to a PC gaming alternative. Imagine if Comcast offered this as a service like cable, internet, or phone. For $30/mo you could play any game on their system. Now I can see that as appealing. No rentals, no returns, no need to buy any extra hardware, except an X360 controller.

Just for the record, I just tried this on my Athlon 64 X2 3600+ system and it ran quite well. But CPU usage was about 75% on both cores. That's pretty significant. I can't imagine anything less powerful running this thing very well.

 

I think the non-OnLive version of borderlands that you showed us looks better than OnLive's....

 

Of course it does, it's probably the same settings, but without the added quality loss due to video compression. And the fact that this absolutely does not support wifi (although I game over wifi all the time without noticeable lag) ruins it for many laptop users.

 

just buy a videocard

 

Well, the idea was that the service would be usable on a wide variety of devices that you can't simply "buy a video card" for, i.e. notebooks, netbooks, perhaps even phones. But if it refuses to work on WiFi...well then frankly, it's useless. If you're tethered to a desktop anyways, you could get a 5770 for less than the cost of one year of OnLive, and a card like will allow you to run games at high resolutions and details fluidly.

Not to mention the pricing model is beyond stupid. If this were more like NetFlix, I could see it being a runaway hit in a couple of years when network infrastructures can better support it. But for OnLive, the $15 a month gets you precisely nothing; you still have to buy all the games separately. In fact, most of the games are selling for more than they are on competing services - $20 to essentially rent UT3 is a bit steep when GameStop sells it for $10.

 

Is this like Steam? I think I'll stick with Steam. For 2 obvious reasons - my internet is much less than 5mb/s and I don't live in USA! Also I love Steam

 

@lowlymarine - The service is $5/mo. They changed it from $15 during the beta phase.

@cakefish - Not at all like Steam. It streams games to your computer instead of buying and downloading, you buy and it streams. Which means you have zero control over the games.

 

This is streaming service more like netflix or any Video On Demand on any set top box for your tv. You pay a fee and you either rent or buy, allowing you to stream from cloud server processing the game to your pc or hub or whatever. Theres tons of pros to this and cons and is heavily debated what ONLIVE should do or conitinue doing.


A great PRO is you never have to worry about upgrading hardware , if games were a little more affordable on the service this would be a great buy . All Onlive would have to do is upgrade their servers GPUs and it would increase graphics power tenfold, more quickly than the way we do it now.

Cons are you never get a physical copy of the game, and its held down by the internet. Lets say internet goes down during a rainy day, no games for you to play, or your internet speed isnt very quick, well expect laggy games that are near unplayable, or compression artifacts the games look like low res ps2 ports, You cancel your account and lose all the games you just bought.

They definitely need to fix a few things before this service becomes steller again, and brings back a new golden age of pc gaming.

 

Hey Kevin I got another request for you if you would do it so kindly, take a screen cap same place with everything turned high and post a pic. Please and thankyou!!

 

This is a laptop Forum genius, Id just like to point that out. And unless you plan on making the VIDOCK this comment should be discarded.

 

Onlive:


Low:


High:

 

Wow, So the idea of "super graphics server" is totally garbage, I know one of Onlive's Selling points is that its graphics would be mind blowing, you wouldnt have to upgrade hardware anymore and the best graphics would be processed and then sent to your house. The HIgh setting photo is enough to go out and buy a vid card or a capable laptop. Onlive needs to fix that quick.

EDIT: Although if you compare Onlive to the low res steam pic, it seems to maybe have an effect or 2 more on it, I wonder how it compares to the console version?? If I still had my copy for ps3 id take a pic but I dont and if anyone reading this thread does, could they take a pic to show differences .

EDIT 2: Just another quick edit, if you look at the Onlive screen cap and then the High setting screen cap, it looke like shadows are turned off, I noticed this with the poster on the shack on the right, the high setting one had shadow on and the onlive does not......

 

I'm pretty sure OnLive has Depth Of Field turned on, but every other effect, including shadows, appears to be off.

The console version has all settings on, with like 4xAF, and the 360 version has 2xAA.

 

i find everyday less and less reason to even try this out .

 

this is a complete no go

The graphics and playability of this make it a waste of time and money

Wont be bothering with this

 

Ohhhh depth of field, high end indeed

 

You can use onlive with wifi. Go into network and sharing center. Once there, bridge your wireless connection with your lan and it will bypass the onlive wifi detection.

 

Is crysis available on onlive? I tried looking for it but couldnt find it.

 

No, EA seems to have pulled their support from OnLive. Given the reportedly abysmal performance of Borderlands, however, I wouldn't expect Crysis to be even remotely playable.

 

I honestly think my sub-$400 HTPC can play games better than this "service" can.

 

And you are probably right. This service is making less and less sense. I still think if you paid a monthly fee, like $30/mo and it gave you access to their whole library of games, it would almost be worth it, just to have access to any game at any time. Even then the lag, the low resolution, high pricing, just makes it unattractive. Just like you said, you could build a compact PC (like a shuttle) for under $500 that could play all these games even at higher resolution than they offer, and best of all, no lag!

 

What about if your interenet shuts off during snow storm/thunder storm/-your storm here- you've instantly got nothing to do.... If your a gamer. or what if the game you wanted to play was only supported for 3 years and yesterday was the last day to play it? Who still plays SCC?? Lots and lots of people, if it was on this service its days would be numbered !!!!

 

Steam kicks Onlive in the balls,
no subscription fee to play demo's, games you buy, you own forever

 

Well, to their defense it does say "at least until xx/xx/2013". I also think though, that if you own a game to use the key with their service. Any way you look at it, the setup sucks as it is today.

 

The only way I see it having wings and taking flight is if they did a download aswell, allowing both the option to own and to stream. For streaming they should have like an "ultra high" setting that even the best PC rig can't handle, so you atleast use the streaming, and then if said internet does go down then you atleast can also play the downloaded copy aswell. Kinda of a mix between steam and onlive, I think that would def be a better option. Id easily concider it, to get graphics that cant be done on a consumer GPU, aswell as still owning a copy.