At the last GDC the industry big brains were sat around telling us how games would one day be remotely rendered on big computing clusters and then streamed to our TVs. The big unveil at this year’s GDC has proved them to be correct. Maybe. OnLive is a service on which you use superfast broadband (1.5mbps minimum) to play games on a remote server. You just plug it in to any “entry level” PC or Mac, or hook it up to your TV, and play. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the latest 3D card: because the remote server does the rendering and streams the result to you. That’s the theory anyway, and it’s a theory a bunch of big name publishers have signed up to. Watch the OnLive spokesman Steve Perlman make his big claims after the jump.
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If some day this works, What games will be published?. Could be see games like Armed Assault or DCS Black Shark?.
I think this is only a new piece of shit to obey the players to play the games the editors want.
@ Matt
OK, this is just not funny anymore.
Do you know how many companies invest lots of time, effort and money on stuff that just.does.not.work? Its called R&D most of the time.
I don’t care how many people are in focus testing, unless it is out in the wild and under real-world conditions, there is no evidence that it works.
Phantom, DISCover and everything in between have tried this and failed. Why? For the same aforementioned reasons. Unless you’re playing peggle and are happy with 1999 resolutions, sure it will work.
You think it will work? Fine. Go try this then. Report back.
http://www.streammygame.com
Isn’t this essentially how SecondLife works? And didn’t we learn that a) it was laggy as hell b) didn’t scale c) looks like arse and d) still requires a beefy machine.
- Yes because obviously all those companies have used identical technology.
- If by “1999″ resolutions you actually mean higher than the average resolution @ 720p (http://www.screen-resolution.com/common-screen-resolutions.php) then yeah sure.
You’re right, there’s no evidence it definitely works, but that’s definitely more evidence suggesting it works than evidence suggesting it doesn’t. Again, I’m not claiming it definitely works whereas you seem panic driven to demand that it “will never fly, ever” with all that…. erm…. “proof” you have.
P.S. I’m still interested in knowing who wrote your biography?
RE the notion that a FILO (sic) buffer might be used to store frames before rendering: either this is a typo, or an ingenious way to play computer games through a memento-style filter….
Guys, this will work. Why? Because they have algorithims. And not just any ol’ algorithim – COMPLEX algorithims. The answer to all of life’s problems.
Just like defrag is the answer to all of computer errors. Now, if they just use a complex defrag algorithim – holy crap!
I guess all of those articles I read about games journalists playing games using OnLive were all bogus. Fabrications. It is probably some huge conspiracy with the end goal being to destroy gaming for all time.
This is a brilliant scam, and the perfect example of how easy it is to fool dumb publishers into forking over cash. Times must not be all that tough on publishers as they make us believe. “buhuu, piracy bla bla bla. Oh you can make zero latency connections you say? Here’s 50mill, hope you make some advances on your faster than light connectivity! It will solve all our problems. Now we just need a renderpark that dwarfs any supercomputer cluster ever made! WE’LL ALL BE ROLLING IN DOUGH!!!!”
Fricken idiots. For each guy playing, you’ll need a freakishly hefty gaming rig, an awesome upstream to that client, his downstream has to be more than decent, and packetloss free (packetloss = screwed) and you’d probably need fiber all the way to your computer for this to even seem close to possible. That leaves out about 99% of all possible subscribers. Unless this is actually technology that’s ready around 2025 or so. In which case, stop hyping it.
Fricken faster than light latency.. Gotta love the idea.
Bet ubisoft and EA is all over this with huge amounts of cash. Salivating and panting like frisky little puppies.
I don’t even see why anyone would want this. Seriously, what’s so great about this? “oooh you can play games the way you play them off your harddrive, but all the graphics and sound and whatnot will go through the interwebs!! ZOMG! FANTASTIC!”
Going to be awesome for people in the UK with download limits on their intertubes. Get to play 4 minutes a month. It’s so evident that this would only be useful for people with 85 year old computers. And if this actually did succeed, intel and amd and nvidia and so forth would just die out. Cause they would just be making hardware for workstations at that point. You can bet your ass intel won’t stand for that kinda crap. I’m also pretty sure Intel isn’t all that concerned about this type of alchemy.
Dumbdumbdumbdumb-duuuumb.
I would also like to add that the 720p compressed image would render any kind of tiny detail worthless on a LCD screen that’s not 720p native. And i think the last 720p native LCD screen went off the market when the amiga 1200 stopped being produced. Or thereabouts.
Yesterdays technology – TODAY!
Ooops, forgot to close the quote…..
Aldo said:
“After all, since when did customers drive services?”
Customers can drive services down the drain. If someone develops sub par rubbish and the customers go “yeah.. good work there” and moves on, it’s sleepytimes for that product. Just look at all the MMO’s that don’t listen to the beta testers and the general public. People have more say in what’s successful than anyone with cash really cares to admit. Sure, this thing might sell to suckers who don’t care about rubbish graphics (1080p might seem like xanadu to console gamers, but consider the fact that it’s compressed. and at 1.5mbit it’s compressed REALLY hard. Now your wife or sister or whatever wants to download some episodes of sex and the city from a torrent site..
This tech is seriously just dumb. So many silly things in the way. If you live outside of a major city, this is going to be completely useless. Even more so if you live in a country where bandwidth is limited and you have a set amount of gigs pr month and so forth.
It’s gonna sort of work in the US, and it’ll work in certain parts of asia. Forget northern europe, the countries that were the former soviet union and most of eastern europe.
Games will still have to be downloadable or store bought on a physical medium. And that version would be superior to any streamed crap because it would be realtime (no latency) and it would have sharp nice picture quality and brilliant uncompressed sound. So i say again.. Who would want to pay a monthly fee for this? There are streaming game sites right now that stream games to your computer and everything plays local, but no one uses them. Cause it’s inconvenient and crappy.
This might be a little bit better, if it works the way they say it will, but it will also be more expensive, and also available to a way smaller userbase.
Anyone thinking this will stop piracy as a twat, and that’s the only reason for anyone to actually want to publish through this. People who can’t afford to upgrade their pc’s once a year for gaming performance already bought a console. And all games these days are released on multi platforms anyways.
dumdedumdum-silly.
The amount of callousness in this comment thread is amazing 0_o
The amount of misinformation and idiocy equally so. Nobody ever said anything of ftl transmissions or similar nonsense.
Here’s today’s presentation at the GDC, one hour long, they play Crysis on a low end Dell, a Macbook and the Microconsole via the actual Datacenter that will host the finished service as well.
Plus there’s a Q&A at the end where they talk a lot about lag, bandwidth etc.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/25/video-onlive-streaming-game-demonstrated/#continued
Personally, I think this is not only feasible but also highly desirable. As do all of the people I’ve talked to about it so far: enthusiasm all around, most would like it now.
With ISPs currently whinging about the demands video streaming places on their services what are the potential consequences of something like this taking off?
The video epsy’s linked to answers quite a lot.
He talks about the average for 720p being somewhere around 2mbit which is around 240kB so it’s around 4kB a frame, which is mightly impressive.
I am sure that whoever is betting “the farm” on this working has thought of most if not all of these ideas. Latency, numbers of computers needed, etc. Are pretty basic problems that in the 7 years of development I am sure they have thought of. They have had 7 years to fix problems people think that they haven’t come up with solutions to problems you thought of in the last 7 hours??? I for one HOPE it works because I don’t have the $$ for constant computer upgrades.
All the comparisons to the Phantom are completely off base. Phantom didn’t have any publisher support, it had some venture capital and some other independent non-industry financing. Phantom didn’t have any working hardware, it had a mock up of the console. Phantom didn’t have any network infrastructure, or any solid plans to develop it.
OnLive has significant publisher support, working hardware, and already has a datacenter/server farm in Santa Clara, with plans for another on the east coast.
Does this mean that the service WORKS? Not necessarily. But it’s not vapourware, either, and they certainly appear to have a good idea about what it is exactly that they’re doing. And hey! External beta starts in the summer, maybe people could actually try it before dismissing it out of hand as unpossible.
But hey, I’m 17 and have read some wiki pages about network architecture, I know everything and OnLive is impossible.
(disclaimer: I’m not actually 17, but I am being sarcastic)
If you have money for a fiber internet connection, you have the $400 dollars that will cost you the latest PC. And local will be always more smooth, and better resolution, and better responsivenes, and less DRM than a datacenter 1000 miles away.
There’s no way this could be profitable, without huge monthly costs, and even if it is, there’s no way this is going to take off.
The userbase is limited to people with decent connections who are in vicinity to Onlive server hubs because of just how much latency would affect the gameplay and the rigs, bandwidth are going to cost a lot. That, and if this takes off i expect to see monthly bandwidth caps to become way more frequent, as ISPs are going to react to the huge amount of bandwidth Onlive is going to use.
Actually bah, if you’d bothered to take a look at the video espy pointed out. They’ve been in talks with ISP’s, who are happy with what they’re doing. Somebody even questioned about a 150gb monthly cap, and they basically said it’s a non issue. Check out the link.
I was at GDC today, and I checked out their booth at the expo floor. My biggest gripe with their demos is that they were running at what appeared to be ~15fps. I’m not a stickler for frames per second performance, but 15 is pretty ridiculous FOR A DEMO BOOTH AT A SHOW. Which leads me to believe that (a) they don’t know how to put together a demo or (b) they literally can’t get better than that. Both are disturbing to me.
Yes and no… what i mean is, the big companies – the ones that make software or hardware that dominates the PC/networking industry – are pretty good at pushing out products that suit their aims above that of consumer. Usually there’ll be peripheral benefits to the customer, of course, but generally most things by MS, Sony, et al are (IMO) developed and sold to further that companies overall ambitions.
What i mean is, companies can still force stuff onto the market and onto people if they’re powerful enough. Call me cynical, but I work (well, for the moment) at one of the worlds biggest hardware companies (being obfuscating here), and they’ll push out unnecessarily expensive or extravagantly pointless products at the same time as slashing benefits, and sacking lots of people. And somehow this works, and people buy overpriced kit (or software).
This tech is seriously just dumb. So many silly things in the way. If you live outside of a major city, this is going to be completely useless. Even more so if you live in a country where bandwidth is limited and you have a set amount of gigs pr month and so forth.
It’s gonna sort of work in the US, and it’ll work in certain parts of asia. Forget northern europe, the countries that were the former soviet union and most of eastern europe.
Part of the US; offhand I think broadband penetration (and availability) in the US is relatively poor compared to much of europe and asia.
@ Darius K
Which is EXACTLY what we’ve been talking about here. Apparently they were 50 miles from the station. And running at ~15fps. Now picture what happens when this gets thrust into a real world environment where you have THOUSANDS of people playing.
My guess is that this was always set out to be White box type operation which is only attractive to cable and telco operators – who already have the infrastructure. e.g. you have to be a certain distance from a DSL box to have the service.
Expect Comcast to be the first to sign on to host it. Right after, they’re going to start gauging their subscribers due to that whole bandwidth cap thing.
Nice article about the topic:
http://worldofdiscourse.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/onlive-terminal-computers-make-their-return-as-gaming-rigs-of-doom-woo/
The main reason I hope this fails is that is anti-competitive. Assuming it’s 100% successful technologically, people who subscribe to this system would bear the higher cost of OnLive and internet subscription fees mostly due to the perceived savings of not having to upgrade the computer.
However, when people have under-powered computers and are already dishing out monthly payments for “gaming service”, there’s much less incentive to buy competing games which are not offered through OnLive. Developers will have little choice but to develop for the prominent system (currently windows), and will have a much reduced market if they buck the trend.
This could give one or two companies a high level of control over the gaming population at large. Pricing, availability and content would be controlled to maximize profit.
I suppose it would be sort of like if Steam became so popular that it was the only feasible distribution system, and you started having to subscribe to the games instead of purchasing them.
Let them do this to consoles. There’s a reason I stick to PC and relinquishing control of my software is not one of them.
…and here is the whole shebang in a more sensible anecdotal manner that I agree with 100%
Everyone here should please read this article.
http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=13939
Anyone commented on how this new future of gaming will completely ruin user created content and mods?
someone did, but no-one responded… :(
Hmmm… for normal rendering techniques, it’s only saving the cost of purchasing a mid-range graphics card, which is not all that much.
However, there are probably techniques (photon mapping?) that are on the one hand easier to run in parallel and on the other hand, have a lot of upfront calculation cost for any scene, with each additional viewer only adding some small overhead. If they get the latency issue worked out, then their approach might actually be really beneficial (and could, especially if it arrives at the end of the console lifespan, give momentum to PC gaming).
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