Onlive Gaming Service GDC 09

This service will bomb considering how many ISP's are capping and throttling down people who use high bandwidth (some charge you more if you exceed your monthly alottment). Considering how much some of us game, if we played HD streaming games our ISP bills would be hundreds of dollars each month.

 

From my understanding you can still purchase games, similar to steam.

 

They will be in some remote location, not on your harddrive or in some physical copy form which is bad. At least you can take an HDD out of a computer and take it with you.

 

Yes, but you will still have to pay to access to them. It won't be like now when you pay once and are done with it, it'll be like MMOs except for single player games too.

 

Imagine, paying for the service and having access to a world of MMOs and other games. If this kills off consoles, like I hope this does, then we will have a unified gaming network. One where you don't need to by a new console every 4 years, don't have to buy new PC hardware every couple of years and pay subscription services to a handful of different companies. The industry will note have to worry about piracy so they can put their efforts towards other goals, not talking about price cuts, but rather expanded services.

Than again, that is the idealist speaking. Knowing these scum sucking companies, Sony and MS will charge subscription fees to play its games in its communities, not to mention licensing fees up to ying yang to try and kill this service.

 

Well, I am skeptical. Centralized computing can work for nearly any app provided enough processing is available, but the network infrastructure has to support it as well.

I do not doubt that a company could put together enough processing to make for a great centralized gaming center, but quite frankly the US internet infrastructure is not very good.

Odds are they use a 720p signal at 24fps which will dissappoint many, but even that will require significant bandwidth and will likely have quite a bit of control lag.
*moves control sideways.... wait for it... game moves sideways a little later*

There are some games which will likely rock on it... and others which will not.
Replace PCs? No way.
Replace consoles? Possible, but doubtful.

 

Consoles last 5+ years. PS3 will last at least 10 years so consoles are meant for a longer run with cheaper price. This service has too many faults, so it can't and won't be successful.

Link to their new press-conference - http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/?series=on-the-spot&event=on_the_spot20090324

Basically, this service must cost over 100$ a month for it to be profitable for them and the picture quality will suck. A funny thing is, how they wasted 15 minutes praising the supporters...

The fact is - even the best h.264 methods cannot pack 720p video at 60fps with 5Mbps net, they must macroblock quite a bit. So your connection must be at least 12Mbps or the client will have a really blocky picture. And we're talking only about picture .. including 5.1 sound makes it even more fail. -_-

So overall - it's basically another super-fail idea right now. Maybe they could introduce it 2020 when high-speed net is avalible to all and bandwith is unlimited.

 

Think about it:

Cost of internet + Subscription fee to service + prices of games themselves that wont even be stored on your hard drive = service not worth it.

Honestly it would be awesome, but not possible atm.

 

Akuma, pretty sure its not going to be at 60fps.
It is possible to run 24fps and succeed but they still trade quality in the form of lower frame rate.

Provided the games are optimized for 24fps, it might be ok visually.

Still... 5Mbit isn't really guaranteed even in larger cities.

 

There's some problems with this. Firstly, while companies like Comcast, roadrunner, and cox cable advertise speeds up to 16Mbit/s, and some even over 20mbit/s, the latency of most coaxial based networks is very high. Most will actually get an average of 60ms pinging to a server only a hundred miles away, this latency alone would make responsive gaming impossible. Online FPS's and other games have methods to compensate for the delay so that the player will almost never notice if it's below 100ms, but there's no method you can ever do that will make input movements respond on screen before you even do them.

Would it make nVidia and ATI go out of business? No, but one of them would if this were successful. And that one would be AMD/ATI because the systems clearly use nVidia graphics cards since one of the nVidia tech demos is shown on the games list of the OnLive demo.

I also think this company is jumping the gun too soon. Not only would the network costs for all of this data cost in the tens of millions of US dollars per month, but every few years ALL of the server hardware would have to be upgraded to support upcoming games, meaning everything would have to either be shut down, or periodically upgraded costing potentially BILLIONS of dollars every few years to upgrade the hundreds of thousands, or millions of servers.

Basically I'm against the service as you can obviously tell, but not only am I against it, I know for a fact that it WILL NOT work. I'm also strongly against a single massive company that dominates an entire market with no competitors. This leads to price fixing and is something that is illegal in the US and many other countries.

 

I would have loved to be one of the analysts who did the calculations on this project....

...Because it has so much potential but it has so many ways it could fail as well. Not to mention it probably has huge startup costs, i.e. seeing as how they have been working on it for over 7 years.

I can see a lot of people killing themselves if this goes bad

 

There is a new way to play the latest PC games without having the latest and greatest GPU.
www.onlive.com
This service looks promising using there servers and a broadband connection to stream you games without any lag.
Not sure exactly how it's going to work, but I'm sure it's some sort of subscription service.
The hardware looks pretty cool also you get a Microconsole and a gampad.
No pricing announced at this stage, it is still in beta testing but you can sign up.
What do you guys think?
Are we going to lose the need to upgrade our GPU's to the latest and greatest?
This looks like a winner if they come up with all they say it's going to be, and they also look to have most if not all the big game publishers lined up.
Imagine the possibilities, playing CRYSIS or LEFT4DEAD(or whatever the latest and greatest game you are into) on a netbook or some other laptop with weak GPU's.
DISCUSS!

 

i think the idea is good, but in real life i highly doubt they'd overcome the latency issues

 

There was already a thread a while back about this here.

 

Thanks for the link Hirohata, I didn't see this before until now.
I am always late to the party.
The idea looks great here's hoping they can pull it off.

 

Lol wouldent it be great if you werent actually playing and it just streamed videos of the game. They just give you a controler to mash to make you think your doing something. Its the thought that counts.

 

Onlive would be more interesting as a server product for home networks. You load it on your massively powerful desktop and then play the game on any computer in your house via a highspeed lan connection (wireless N or wired 100/1000 baseT). Similarly, this would vastly simplify LAN parties and gaming events.

As it stands, it isn't a service that can work over the US's infrastructure. We'd need fiber everywhere and 50/50mbit connections as the low-mid tier of internet connections. The demo was run off a gigabit ethernet link to a server in the same building.

 

Something like this has existed for a while for home networks:

http://streammygame.com/smg/index.php

Great idea if you run it on your local server and network.

But over the internet there's way too many issues to iron out that is outside of "onlive"'s control. Ping and data interruption is their biggest enemy. Downloading files and streaming videos are one thing, but streaming a game where you need 30ms or less response won't happen, except for the very privileged few.

I can see this as beneficial for a video game arcade or cafe, where you have a local network and just have to buy a handful of powerful servers with much less expensive terminals. Other than that, forget it.

 

Last as in not break? Yes.
Last as in play the newest games for 10 years? No Fking Way!.

I can assure you by the end of 2010 there will be games struggling or completely down throttled on the consoles. Already GTAIV is a pretty big disapointment on the consoles. It looks good on the screen but when youve played it in high theres no going back. I had a friend playing it on my laptop, then he bought it for PS3. He was depressed.

Consoles will last a while but they also are getting more expensive. At release, consoles are almost as much as a entry level gaming pc.

Onlive is a neat idea, but I don't want to see it succeed too much. It could be a very bad thing if it does.

 

Any console that you buy already has an expiration, as soon as a console goes gold, they start working on the next generation.

 

It sounds like it would be great for MMOs. After all, they're already subscription based online games that are generally tolerant to latency. Not to mention that you can hop onto virtually any computer and play.

It sounds like it would be a poor choice for single player and LAN multiplayer games though:

• No modding
• removal of server or game support would mean you can't play the game anymore
• unnecessary bandwidth use and Internet connection requirement
• subscription fees (bad if you play mostly single-player games)

OnLive sounds great in some cases, but I certainly hope that it complements rather than outright replace retail boxed games.

The biggie is the lack of modding, which is directly related to the absolute control that the publishers/developers will be able to exert. The PC gaming community will change forever; and in my opinion not in a good way. Of course, this control is too great to pass up, so I'm willing to bet publishers will push very hard to go OnLive exclusive someday.