OnLive Promises HD Game Streaming Comments

Well it was only a matter of time. And time is the factor here, however, it might be too soon for such a service to really take off. Major stumbling block being the infrastructure to handle such a service. Yes, we know that there are plans to upgrade the cable networks to street cabinets with optical cables, but this will take years to implement completely. Also, although Virgin optical broadband offers huge speeds for gaming they also have one of the most draconian attitudes towards bandwidth use. Even when you are simply using a wonderful service such as iPlayer. Seriously, I would love such a left-of-field approach to gaming, but pricing and fair usage policies already limit our respective use of current network infrastructures and these walls won't suddenly dissolve once this is released by the end of the year. That and the fact that there are 3 Big Boys who will have a say which way gaming should turn.

i dreamed of a service like this when netbooks came out - as a means of playing my high end pc games via my pc, streamed live to a netbook.

this, though, takes things to a whole new level... bye bye gaming laptop

Did I miss something, or did the video promo show everything BUT actually playing a game.?

Weird.

Still pretty amazing, I wouldn't have guess decent rates would be possible yet on current setups, but maybe citrix for work is not a good comparison :)

I'll accept that a smooth 720p framerate is possible with reasonable image quality over a 5 meg connection, and that - with sufficient processing horsepower - it may be possible to compress and decompress video with sufficiently little latency to make it playable (though 1 ms is, I suspect, total pie in the sky), but network latency alone is likely in my view to kill this. Anyone who has played an online game will be familiar with lag, but it is generally manageable because at least the inputs and graphics are being handled locally, so you have the perception that game controls are immediate. If the game is streamed over a normal broadband connection, that 100ms or whatever will make for nasty sluggish controls. As such, I really can't see this taking off unless a major overhaul of the domestic broadband infrastructure reduces network latency to a much lower, and reliably low, level.

Would be good for strategy games like Empire: Total War though - input responsiveness isn't so important there. Rubbish for a first person shooter or a flight sim though, network latency of 100ms or more would just render them too frustrating.

the biggest problem is going to be the subscription price or game purchase price, the publishers online stores are more expensive than buying from a store or play etc. went to download the latest total war off steam, what a rip off as compared to a store price when there is no packaging etc involved. you just know a publisher like EA is gonna screw you, also, how long will they support games like BF2 for instance which is hacked to death and needs patching/incremental update as per EA/Dice speak. the precedent is set with music as per Spotify in how to get an internet service right but even there the coporate greed of the music publishers hold it back. sorry, rant over - could be a brilliant thing if done at the right price, can see those server providers quaking already.

@johnmclean:
I suspect that all game processes will be done by the server, so if for example some people want to play burnout paradise, the server would calculate everything and all that's actually travelling between computers are audio and video feeds (and control commands), which we know can be transferred over our networks in real time.

Services like logmein prove that you can have realtime control, the trick is reducing the round trip to the server and back to acceptable levels for gaming. Although if you want this here and now, you could always play minesweeper via logmein. :)

upstream bandwidth is going to be a real bitch for this, especially in the UK where the advertised "up to 8Mbit" etc makes no mention of the fact that the upload rate is usually a fraction of that! I really do hope it's improved since last I knew of it specifically, but it used to be that 4MBit internet was 4Mbps maximum theoretical download, but 256Kbps upload!

As such, this service would theoretically be fine for USA etc, but the UK will have serious problems - not least because of the ISPs going mental about the bandwidth being used. What use is paying £50 a year, then £30 each for games, when you can play that game for about 30mins maximum before your ISP throttles you and you can't play the game anymore until the bandwidth is returned - or even worse, your ISP threatens to disconnect you and/or charge you an obscene and uncorrelated extra amount for an increased cap further adding to the costs of this service! So that's £50 a year for OnLive, £30 for each game (£35 for EA games it seems) and £30 per month for the "Ultimate" unthrottled maximum-capped broadband to allow you to play it whenever and for however long you want.

Basically, this proposed gaming service will require a complete change in the business model of ISPs, and a complete upgrade of the upstream infrastructure of the internet in the UK

One word: LAG

another word, now i think about it: BIG BROTHER

As well as the concerns over network capacity and response times, what about the computing power needed to drive all this? Look at the computing power needed to play one recent game on an Xbox 360, PS3 or half decent PC graphics card. Then think about the heat that each one generates, just for one player. Now multiply this by what is needed to cater for 100s or 1000s of gamers potentially on line at once with no slowdown and you are looking at one hell of a supercomputer which will probably use more power than Sheffield. Does the technology REALLY exist yet for this, and is anyone really going to risk the massive amounts of cash needed to build such a system, given that it'll live or die dependant on the networks & ISPs that serve it. Even if the infrastructure was up to the job, OnLive could easily be held over a barrel by the ISPs if they so wished, as without them the service doesn't work.

This company is obviously based on the Planet Utopia. If they can get it to work here on Planet Victoriana with our string and tin-cans infrastructure I think they're onto a winner.

Comment ilovethemonkeyhead said on 24th March 2009

i dreamed of a service like this when netbooks came out - as a means of playing my high end pc games via my pc, streamed live to a netbook.

this, though, takes things to a whole new level... bye bye gaming laptop


I've been using StreamMyGame for months to stream my games on my EeePC...so this is nothing new

All this just won't work. If only they don't place their servers in each of their users' apartments.

OnLive should be awesome. There are a ton of people that will be interested in this and they should be very successful. Check out OnLivefans.com, they already have a public discussion forum for this.

Anyone who thinks this won't work, should check out QuakeLive. Believe this is very real.
Xenos, I experienced very little lag, certainly nothing like the HPB days of old, just the odd frame missing.
What I want to know is can cheats exploit it.

@b166er

Sorry mate, Quakelive is just quake in a browser. Instead of running a program, it starts an activex control. Your PC is still running the game.