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OnLive Running Smoothly in Demo at DICE
by Jeff Mattas, Feb 18, 2010 6:30pm PSTOnLive, the upcoming cloud-based games-on-demand service that will supposedly allow subscribers to stream and play high-end games on modest PC configurations, was demonstrated at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas today.
According to a report by Dean Takahashi on GamesBeat, OnLive founder Steve Perlman demonstrated the service at DICE with COO Mike McGarvey using a cable modem connection to show how the service handled some unnamed "high-speed shooting games," as well as Unreal Tournament and Burnout Paradise. Takahashi asserts that the demos were glitch-free, and should take the wind out of the sails of skeptics who've claimed that OnLive couldn't possibly work as well as intended.
In one of the more shocking bits of Takahashi's report, he noted that the OnLive team also demonstrated how iPhone users could even play the graphically-intensive shooter Crysis on the service, live and in real-time.
In OnLive's curent state, standard definition games would require a 1 megabit per second connection, whereas high-definition titles would need a 5-megabit per second connection to play properly. Perlman went on to claim that about twenty-six percent of broadband users currently have connections faster than 5-megabits, and that seventy-one percent currently have 2-megabit per second connections.
Perlman also mentioned that the server hosting the games demonstrated in Las Vegas was located in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that he expects that OnLive will be able to blanket the country in service using only five data centers that would need to be updated every six months.
OnLive is still being tested in a closed beta that launched back in September of last year.
Comments
But this is already happening in MP games. Take MW2, when you click to shoot, your system registers it in the local game instantly, but that doesn't matter. The data still has to be piped to whatever system is HOST (or a dedicated server in other games) which is running the actual game (registering kills, movements, etc). Then the server has to send the data back on whether you hit them or not, so you know how in MW2 it pops up the X to show your shot was a hit? That had to go out across the internet to a server and register, then the server had to send the "yes, it hit" message back to your computer.
Now granted, there will probably be more data being pushed to and fro with the onlive service (VIDEO!), but thats bandwidth, not latency.
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That doesn't mean it can't work for the masses, but the business model doesn't make much sense to me. Their target market seems to fit these characteristics:
-Semi-serious gamer
-Doesn't notice input lag
-Not enough money for a console or PC
-Enough money to afford monthly fee + games
Wow, it seems like they could literally gross... hundreds of dollars a month. Now factor in the hardware cost to support each active client, the bandwidth cost, the need for localized data centers to get into new markets... I mean, they must have something super special up their sleeve to have gotten funding from investors.
So, we'll see, but it seems like a pipe dream from the dot com era. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see the company taken down in an embezzlement scheme.
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But aside from that is the atrociously offensive business model they were proposing: subscribe to the service, buy each individual game you want to play on it, and if you unsubscribe you can't access those games anymore.
This to me is little more than a very expensive way to rent games.
Points for effort, but no. A thousand times, no.
The price they pay, apart form the "real" $$ price, is latency.
With cloud gaming, not one of those important aspects listed above is required, useful, or even necessary, the major dawbacks of cloud computing are all that is left, the cost, which will be considerable, and the latency, which for a large portion of potential customers will be the killer.
Single player will be manageable, but forget mutiplayer, as the entire game will have to sync to the slowest connection.
And if you think 100 VM PC's running Windows XP, Office 2007, and a few business apps requires a killer server rig, can you imagine the requirements for 100 virtual PC's running Crysis???!
Sorry, too early, mebbe 2020!
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Some simple rules:
- Circle-strafing is not cheating
- Running up to you and knifing you is not cheating
- Leading shots is not cheating
- Strafing like crazy is not cheating
- Being a LPB is not cheating
- Grenade and Rocketjumps as well as Grenade-Rocketjumps are magic to you (and not cheating)
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I'm still not sure who this is targeted at (people that fantasize about being a PC gamer?), or how they're going to get by the latency/ quality issues, but it should be interesting to watch the whole thing crash and burn.
That the target audience is so vague, I'm placing my bets right now that this service will get very few subscribers. This would have been an awesome idea, though, if it were a hundred years in the future and we all lived in giant apartment buildings stuffed with fiber optics.
It just seems like it's ahead of its time. Like the PhysX card.
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Even if they show it working for a live demo, I think 10'000 people connecting to their servers will introduce lag.
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And I'm also worried that this might affect the PC platform. nVidia and AMD aren't going to be really happy about this. I like computer hardware and I love upgrading (you can say it's a hobby). I don't feel comfortable with this.
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I'm not gonna be able to play consoles games with a kb+m with this right? Instead it's about playing PC games with a controller?
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"They're testing out BC2 on OnLive? Wha? Why is this important?"