the future of videogaming

  Quote

What if you could stream games, any game, over a decent broadband connection to your PC or Atom-based netbook at the same quality as the PS3? Would you walk away from your beloved console? That's the of hope of Palo Alto-based OnLive. But this is much more than empty rhetoric -- OnLive's been dropping jaws of the press who've seen it working this week. GameDaily dubbed the play "fantastic" after seeing Crysis streamed "smooth" off a server to a plain ol' MacBook laptop. See, OnLive claims to have perfected the video compression so that latency (just 1-millisecond) is low enough to support on-line multiplayer setups. Broadband connections of 1.5Mbps (71% of US homes have 2Mbps or greater) dials the image quality down to Wii levels while 4-5Mbps pipes are required for HD resolution. At the moment, OnLive is showing 16 high-end titles at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco and expects to be able to release new games within the same window as traditional retail launches. The games can be played on "any PC (Windows XP or Vista) or Mac" without the heavy cash-burden of a high-end graphics card, fast disk, quad-core proc, and truck-load of memory. Otherwise, OnLive plans to release what it calls a MicroConsole with Bluetooth (for voice chat) and optical audio-out that can be connected to your HDTV over HDMI -- pricing has not been announced but it will cost less than a $250 Wii. There's a community element too, of course, with OnLive reps boasting about it operating on an "unprecedented scale." This includes the ability to join live games at any point, the creation of "brag clips" that saves the last 10 seconds of game play for sharing, as well as leaderboards, rankings, and the rest. And if you think publishers will never buy in to the model, think again: Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, THQ, Epic Games, Eidos, Atari Interactive and Codemasters are already on-board. Expect OnLive to launch this Winter with monthly subscriptions available in "a variety of different pricing packages and tiers, competitively priced to retail." Damn.

onlive

can i still use it to blast sh101 over halo voice chat?

Yeah my so-called highspeed internet will blow chunks trying to get this.

Fuck I miss seoul.

where are you at the moment chenGOD?

wow... kinda WTF... say good bye to the hardware market if this actually does what it says it does.

  goffer said:

wow... kinda WTF... say good bye to the hardware market if this actually does what it says it does.

just like how porn killed sex

isn't this just hype and marketing from some company that's trying to get a piece of steam's success

steaming pile of crap

I miss sega channel

upon closer reading, this actually sounds amazingly cool. the latency could throw you off if it's noticeable though

  thanks robert moses said:

I miss sega channel

:angel: :angel: :angel: :angel: :confused: :confused: :confused: :confused: :

This won't work for a number of reasons:

1) Unless US/other countries with shitty broadband get it together, this is going to be a big dissapointment for users.

2) They're saying the service will cost 50USD for a subscription - is that annually, monthly or what? If it's annually, I guarantee you that the games will be extra, and probably only for rental, since the only place it would exist is on their servers. Once you factor those things in, it could get pretty expensive.

3) All the games will be the same - PC games essentially. This is not like they're creating a new unique platform; they're just using plain old PC servers to stream games to people.

4) The major companies, like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft will not get on board - there will be too many franchises that are made for console gaming that won't fit this business model. People are not going to want to give that up.

5) This sounds strangely like the Phantom game console (remember that) that was supposed to offer downloadable games, on a unified platform (aka: a PC).

I think it's a cool idea and would gladly pay a subscription to play games instead of buying consoles/upgrading gpu.

Stupid idea. Like Joyrex said. Not possible with current technology/internet infrastructure.

I for one wouldn't like this as the future at all. If this would be the future, high-end consumer hardware could become more of a niche. And I care for my freedom to use/abuse my processor power for anything I want.

this is not possible with current games. maybe if you wanted to make it happen for ps1 or ps2 games it could work, but 360/ps3 games are simply too involved for the control peripherals to communicate with the server and process the commands in an acceptable (split second) amount of time.

Don't Sony and Microsoft lose big bucks on every console sold? And they make it back with game sales?

It's a great idea, for very casual gamers like myself (maybe buy 1-2 games a year), who roll their eyes at console exclusives, PC upgrades and all the other bullshit that goes with playing videogames, this would make gaming a lot more attractive.

What if you could play Crysis on your cellphone? I think some of you are underestimating the gaming market. How many if you know people who happily pay $5 for the DOS game Snake on their god damn cellphone? I know at least a dozen people who blow their money on the shittiest games imaginable simply because it is 'portable'. Quality is irrelevant to the demographic this type of stuff targets.

  Al Hounos said:

Don't Sony and Microsoft lose big bucks on every console sold? And they make it back with game sales?

 

It's a great idea, for very casual gamers like myself (maybe buy 1-2 games a year), who roll their eyes at console exclusives, PC upgrades and all the other bullshit that goes with playing videogames, this would make gaming a lot more attractive.

This probably won't change your gaming/buying habits - as a matter of fact, people who tend to 'game casually' will not pay for a subscription they hardly use, nor rent games they can't play anytime they want (i.e.: pop it in on a whim, play for 20-30 minutes, turn it off). It's a really bad business model, if you look more into the habits of gamers and their demographic.

  Drahken said:

What if you could play Crysis on your cellphone? I think some of you are underestimating the gaming market. How many if you know people who happily pay $5 for the DOS game Snake on their god damn cellphone? I know at least a dozen people who blow their money on the shittiest games imaginable simply because it is 'portable'. Quality is irrelevant to the demographic this type of stuff targets.

That's the thing - this isn't portable; it's a thin-client terminal that will require you to have a decent enough connection in order to play HD games at a reasonable framerate/resolution. Your cellphone can't even display a video of Crysis (which is essentially how they are describing how the streaming works) acceptably, let alone play it as a game. Portable gaming is popular because it's portable; being tethered to an internet connection (again, because most countries lame broadband infrastructure doesn't support decent wifi coverage) smacks in the face of portability, especially when the game resides on a server somewhere and not even the local hardware.

  thanks robert moses said:

I miss sega channel

Man those were the days. Sitting around on my friend's giant ass sofa, octo-bong in place....

  Ego said:

Stupid idea. Like Joyrex said. Not possible with current technology/internet infrastructure.

current infrastructure in shitty third-world countries like Canada and the States. YAY for teleco/cable monopolies!

  hahathhat said:

streaming pile of crap

fixd

It seems like a really good idea if everyone is equipped with a +10mbit connection.

The thing I'm worried about is the lack it will cause, even though the overall the reactions have been very positive. But the tests so far have been in a controlled environment with only a few hundred internal beta testers populating the system, so it doesn't really show the system in full scale. I'm really curious to see how they'll manage 1.000.000 players playing Crysis.

I don't know if you've seen the interview on Gametrailers but the guy behind OnLive claims that the servers will deliver video feeds that have a ping of less than one millisecond. It almost sounds too good to be true.

He also talks about how the messages are being sent back and forth between the server and the gamer's computer. If the gamer left-clicks on his/her mouse, then "left-click" will be sent off to the a server, which will then render a new frame, and send this frame back to the computer. I refuse to believe that a hardened gamer won't notice the latency.

  Squee said:

It seems like a really good idea if everyone is equipped with a +10mbit connection.

The thing I'm worried about is the lack it will cause, even though the overall the reactions have been very positive. But the tests so far have been in a controlled environment with only a few hundred internal beta testers populating the system, so it doesn't really show the system in full scale. I'm really curious to see how they'll manage 1.000.000 players playing Crysis.

I don't know if you've seen the interview on Gametrailers but the guy behind OnLive claims that the servers will deliver video feeds that have a ping of less than one millisecond. It almost sounds too good to be true.

He also talks about how the messages are being sent back and forth between the server and the gamer's computer. If the gamer left-clicks on his/her mouse, then "left-click" will be sent off to the a server, which will then render a new frame, and send this frame back to the computer. I refuse to believe that a hardened gamer won't notice the latency.

Says "Hardened Gamer" in best Beavis & Butthead voice.

  Quote

Burnout Paradise

Company of Heroes

Crysis

FEAR

I'll pass.

you know, beyond the whole fact that the current videogame people aren't going to want to lose their marketshare, there's a bigger issue here: it's just another way to take things out of your house and store them centrally for "ease of use".

it's like the transition from answering machines to voicemail. i had an issue with comcast where they gave us a voicemail that would juke our answering machine, and they never told us about it. when i called them up on some ol "wtf?!@" they're like "but it's a gift from us... it's free!" and i'm like "but iw ant to use the answering machine" and they told me how much better this voicemail is it can be accessed anywhere and why do i want to have that clunky thing, besides this is a free gift from comcast!! and it's like "fucker, iw ant the messages sitting here in my house, not your servers"

it's kind of like how nowadays people don't make their own hello world webpages, they get a myspace or facebook. they store their pictures on remote hosts, as opposed to tangibly going and developing them into pictures, they exist as computer files.

the microsoft zune wants you to subscribe to their music service and access everything for $15/month, and i'm sure there's other services like whatever that rhapsody thing is that does the same thing, witht eh general idea being you can come to us for whatever you need!@#

so i certainly hope they don't take steps to antiquate video games, as having tangible things is evidently a dying breed cuz really who needs things when you can have dummy terminals connecting to master mainframes over super wi-fi standards taht flawlessly transfer tens to hundreds of megabytes a second!

hell pretty soon they'll try to tell us that we dont need hard drives, why bother when your personal flash drive can carry everything everywhere and you have a standard of dummy terminals to access the net, it can load your settings and personal info from the superflashdrive, i mean really, you dont need anything except what's on the servers, right!?@$#

from now til the end it's a daily march of rights evaporating mm-mmm yeah

  sinicalypse said:

you know, beyond the whole fact that the current videogame people aren't going to want to lose their marketshare, there's a bigger issue here: it's just another way to take things out of your house and store them centrally for "ease of use".

 

it's like the transition from answering machines to voicemail. i had an issue with comcast where they gave us a voicemail that would juke our answering machine, and they never told us about it. when i called them up on some ol "wtf?!@" they're like "but it's a gift from us... it's free!" and i'm like "but iw ant to use the answering machine" and they told me how much better this voicemail is it can be accessed anywhere and why do i want to have that clunky thing, besides this is a free gift from comcast!! and it's like "fucker, iw ant the messages sitting here in my house, not your servers"

 

it's kind of like how nowadays people don't make their own hello world webpages, they get a myspace or facebook. they store their pictures on remote hosts, as opposed to tangibly going and developing them into pictures, they exist as computer files.

 

the microsoft zune wants you to subscribe to their music service and access everything for $15/month, and i'm sure there's other services like whatever that rhapsody thing is that does the same thing, witht eh general idea being you can come to us for whatever you need!@#

 

so i certainly hope they don't take steps to antiquate video games, as having tangible things is evidently a dying breed cuz really who needs things when you can have dummy terminals connecting to master mainframes over super wi-fi standards taht flawlessly transfer tens to hundreds of megabytes a second!

 

hell pretty soon they'll try to tell us that we dont need hard drives, why bother when your personal flash drive can carry everything everywhere and you have a standard of dummy terminals to access the net, it can load your settings and personal info from the superflashdrive, i mean really, you dont need anything except what's on the servers, right!?@$#

 

from now til the end it's a daily march of rights evaporating mm-mmm yeah

Just because you own a physical piece of media does not mean you own the contents. I personally could not care if games were physical or not; as a matter of fact, it would be really cool if wherever I went there was an internet connection, my music, games, email, etc. followed me around, instantly accessible. I just don't think this business model will succeed due to it basically being generic PC games as opposed to console-specific games that look and play differently than PC games.