Comments on: OnLive: The End Of Games Platforms?

By: John439

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By: perilisk

perilisk — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:06:43 +0000

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).

By: Moorkh

Moorkh — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:38:08 +0000

someone did, but no-one responded… :(

By: D

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 06:01:15 +0000

Anyone commented on how this new future of gaming will completely ruin user created content and mods?

By: Subby

Subby — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:24:37 +0000

Everyone here should please read this article.

http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=13939

By: dsmart

dsmart — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:24:46 +0000

...and here is the whole shebang in a more sensible anecdotal manner that I agree with 100%

By: Devan

Devan — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:17:15 +0000

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.

By: Tei

Tei — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:07:20 +0000

Nice article about the topic:
http://worldofdiscourse.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/onlive-terminal-computers-make-their-return-as-gaming-rigs-of-doom-woo/

By: dsmart

dsmart — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:51:25 +0000

@ 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.

By: Aldo

Aldo — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:09:17 +0000

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.

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.

By: Darius K.

Darius K. — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:51:29 +0000

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.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:52:37 +0000

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.