OnLive: The Future of Video Games

[Archonus]

http://www.onlive.com/

Promises to revolutionize the gaming world by providing instant online play, complete support of all kinds of computer set-ups (playing Crysis on an entry-level PC) and a "microconsole", which allows you to use the service on your TV.

Sounds pretty interesting to say the least.

[Jedah]

This is the concept of centralized processing, control, authorization and user management put into gaming. There are many traps for the common gamer in this architectural logic:

1) No offline gaming. No network no play. This is the simplest and most obvious disadvantage.

2) What seems as an effort to take away the hardware expenses from the user is actually the replacement of physical products with a service membership plus the digital products (games). What you have now is a machine that can be used whenever you like for as long as you like (or in the case of a 360 as long as it works). What you will have with a centralized service model is a direct dependency on the manufacturer/maintainer plus a fee for as long as it stays in business. Isn't it more preferable to still boot up SNES and Neo Geos without a fee?

3) No second-hand market. That is what the publishers want to fight with digital distribution. If a game you bought becomes tiresome after a couple of hours, you have no choice but to have it in your collection for ever.

I just hope gamers will stay away from such products/services. It really is a filthy way to make you pay more for less.

[icycalm]

I know someone who uses Steam a lot (he also wrote this article on the service a while back). He says you can make as many back ups of games you've bought as you want, and play all of them offline too. And they have special deals all the time, where you buy games for $5, $10 or $20. So all the negatives you listed do not apply to Steam, and even if Valve goes bankrupt one day, you will still have your back ups to play for ever, basically.

So it depends on the service. Steam seems to be doing everything right. These new guys... who knows.

[Molloy]

As long as there's healthy competition I think digital downloads are a good idea. Steam discounts heavily and does excellent promotions because there are competing distributers on the PC platform.

I'm not so crazy about direct downloads for consoles because I can see a company like Nintendo charging excessively and not having much motivation to discount.

From what I've read about this OnLive service there are alot of reasons why it might not run as satisfactorily as advertised. Only time will tell wether it becomes another Phantom console.

[Worm]

This article explains some of the hardware obstacles in the way of OnLive's promises:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-w ... cle?page=2

in order to make OnLive perform exactly as claimed right now, the company has to have achieved the following:

1. OnLive has mastered video compression that outstrips the best that current technologies can achieve by a vast margin. In short, it has outsmarted the smartest compressionists in the world, and not only that, it's doing it in real-time.

2. OnLive's unparalleled grasp of psychophysics means that it has all but eliminated the concept of IP lag during its seven years of "stealth development", succeeding where the best minds in the business have only met with limited success.

3. OnLive has developed a range of affordable PC-compatible super-computers and hardware video encoders that are generations beyond anything on the market at the moment.

Although I wouldn't use the service, I'm excited about it just in case any of their claims hold true.

[Jedah]

This service is not like Steam. Using Steam requires you to have a "fat" client (aka a gaming PC) capable of reproducing downloaded content from the service. OnLive is not selling data, it's selling the processing also. So no service, no play.

[icycalm]

I am grouping all of these sorts of services together. What if OnLive started giving you the right to download and burn copies of the games you buy, just like Steam, so that you would still own them in the case they went out of business? I don't think Steam allowed you to do this in the beginning -- it was something they added later, and it is something which many people, including I, demand if we are to take the service seriously. And if OnLive never offers it, perhaps a competing service will offer it in the future.

So what I am saying is

I just hope gamers will stay away from such products/services. It really is a filthy way to make you pay more for less.

that I don't see anything filthy about the concept in general -- either the Steam or the OnLive concept, just as, for example, I see nothing wrong with paying eight euros to watch a movie, and then having nothing to take home at the end of the day, or paying 100 yen per credit in the arcades, and again having nothing to take home with me when I am done.

So, at the end of the day, it all depends on the price.

And then there is the fact that in the future all games will cost eight euros and will take about two hours to finish, and they won't really be replayable. But that is a story for another day.

[Jedah]

And then there is the fact that in the future all games will cost eight euros and will take about two hours to finish, and they won't really be replayable. But that is a story for another day.

I don't want to see that era any time soon.

[Molloy]

I think most young people don't care about having physical copies of their media.

Probably the most promising music service available right now is Spotify. You can stream most major label music for free and you're subjected to the occasional advertisement. Because they have information about where you are located, and other personal information, they don't have to drop that much advertising in there.

Television is headed in a similar direction with Hulu and the BBC iPlayer. There are rumblings that after users have gotten accustomed to using the service they'll start asking you to verify your subscription to the TV channel.

Maybe because consoles are closed systems they'll manage to prevent piracy running rampant like it has with video and music. But if they don't they're going to have to adopt similar models.

[icycalm]

http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=131

The Hidden Benefit of OnLive
April 6th, 2009 Soren Johnson Posted in Games |

One of the biggest stories to emerge from GDC 2009 was the emergence of OnLive, a server-based gaming platform which would allow any PC or Mac, including bare-bones ones, with a fast network connection to play any game by running all the code - including the graphics rendering - on the server instead of on the local machine. In many ways, this service is a return to the “dumb terminal” model of the ’70s where no calculations were run on the user’s computer itself. So far, reactions have been mixed. Osma Ahvenlampi argues that, due to network lag, this model could never work; Adam Martin claims that it could work if the servers are located intelligently. Keith Boesky points out that the actual business model is simply acquisition.

I don’t claim to know if OnLive’s specific tech will work or not, but I would like to talk about the implications of this potential shift to server-based games. (Even if OnLive doesn’t make it work, clearly this technology will arrive at some point.) Of course, we already have server-based games - World of Warcraft runs on numerous servers spread around the world, with appropriate bits of game info set to thin clients running on local machines. However, a client is still a tricky piece of software, and as Raph Koster like to remind us, “The client is in the hands of the enemy.”

With OnLive, the client is so thin, I’m not sure if it’s appropriate even to call it a client. It’s more like a video-player. In fact, while the phrase “YouTube for Games” always refers to user-generated content, one should recall that YouTube had a second, perhaps more important, innovation: regardless of how a video was created, as long as the viewers had Flash, they could watch it immediately. The same concept hold for OnLive - as long as you have their app, you can play any game capable of running on their servers.

The implications of this change are huge - simply put, it spells the end of client-server architecture. Developers no longer need to optimize what data is sent to the client and what is kept back. Or worry about cheating. Or piracy, for that matter. While these advantages are huge, of course, what really interests me is that making a game multi-player is now, essentially, trivial. Put another way, the set of developers making one-man MMO’s will now be larger than just Eskil Steenberg.

Writing multi-player games is very, very hard. Trying to keep everything in-sync between servers and clients in a safe, responsive, fair, and accurate manner is no small challenge. With a system like OnLive, these issues evaporate because there are no clients anymore. Developers simply write one game, run it on some server, and update it based on user actions fed in from the network. If such a technology existed when we made Civ4, not only could we have saved man-years of development time and testing, but we could have easily implemented advanced features (games-of-the-day, mod sharing, massive player counts, asynchronous play, democracy-game support, etc.) with very little effort. Of course, I don’t know if OnLive will be the one to do it, but - from a developer’s point-of-view - the importance of this change cannot be overstated.

[El Chaos]

There are some interesting improvements to OnLive's PC client, but the service is now missing some games it previously had: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... ge-quality

So at the very least, OnLive has improved to a significant degree. However, once you're logged into the service, the lack of any new titles on show paints a very worrying picture. The specials section doesn't actively promote anything as of writing, while new additions to the marketplace have been thin on the ground since November 2012. We can also confirm that Warner Bros. has temporarily removed its entire game selection from the OnLive catalogue, up to and including Batman: Arkham City and Lego: Harry Potter. What we're left with is a reasonable collection of older titles and a thorough work-out of first-gen cloud technology, but nothing like the kind of comprehensive competitor to PC, PlayStation and Xbox that the service was originally intended as.