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Games => General Gaming => Topic started by: Xessive on Thursday, March 26, 2009, 04:49:25 AM
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OnLive promises on-demand, streaming games (http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/new-tech-could-make-consoles-obsolete/1299562)
What if you could stream top-end games to your TV, just like a Youtube video that you can control? You'd never need to buy a console again.
That's the future envisaged by Palo Alto startup OnLive, which plans to launch a groundbreaking gaming service this winter. OnLive will supply players with a small set-top box, not much bigger than a Nintendo DS, which will plug into your TV and your home broadband connection. From there, you can start playing games just like those on the Xbox 360, PS3 or PC -- but with no install time, no waiting for downloads, and no need for big, noisy, expensive consoles cluttering up your living room. OnLive's service can be continually upgraded, too, so you'll never be stuck with obsolete hardware again.
Skeptical? So were we, until we actually sat down and played with an OnLive box last week. Even a blisteringly fast racer like Burnout Paradise was totally playable over the service, and top-spec shooter Crysis: Warhead -- which normally requires an expensive gaming PC -- ran excellently too. It's all rolled together with a slick interface that requires just a few button-presses to get playing.
OnLive
OnLive Pictures
OnLive also includes some features you might associate more with your DVR than with a gaming console, including a Replay feature that lets you save the last ten seconds of your gameplay, and send it to your friends.
PC gamers aren't left out, either: OnLive's service can be accessed with a browser plugin from either Mac or PC platforms, works identically to the TV version, and has hardware requirements so low you'll be able, the company boasts, to play the most advanced of games on a $300 netbook.
OnLive has already signed deals with an impressive range of partners -- including EA, Take-Two, and Ubisoft -- and promises to have an up-to-the-minute selection of games when the service launches. Along with Burnout and Crysis, we spotted Grand Theft Auto IV, LEGO Batman, and Mirror's Edge among the games on offer, although the lineup will likely change before the service launches.
There's a catch, though. Being an online, streaming service, OnLive is only going to be as good as your Internet connection. High-definition resolutions will require a higher-end broadband connection, and if your service is prone to drop out unexpectedly, you're probably going to wind up frustrated. Even if it works, all that streaming video's going to add up over the months, and heavy users might find themselves the receipient of some unwelcome attention from their ISPs. Modem users, needless to say, need not apply.
OnLive won't talk price, other than to say that they'll be competitive with subscription services like Xbox Live. The box itself is simple and cheap to make, they told us, and it's easy to imagine it being thrown in with subscriptions -- rather like a cable or satellite TV set-top box. Games will most likely be available to rent or buy, and with free demos that don't need to be downloaded.
I'm thinking "WTF?!"
(http://l.yimg.com/jh/content/p/4/1299799/screen009.jpg)
(http://l.yimg.com/jh/content/p/4/1299799/screen001.jpg)
(http://l.yimg.com/jh/content/p/4/1299799/screen004.jpg)
More Screenshots here (http://videogames.yahoo.com/featurescreenshot?eid=1299799&index=0&spaceid=567002372).
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What is this thing, the Phantom 2?
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Apparently it's a HD streaming device. The first and foremost problem I see is now there's the possibility of lag even in singleplayer. Then of course there's the fact that you will never see a physical copy of the games you buy, you won't even back them up. They'll be on some server somewhere. Further plunging the gaming world down the dependancy heirarchy.
Conceptually I like the idea but I see a lot of technical and moral issues arising.
Gaming would be standardized. You won't upgrade your system coz OnLive will upgrade their systems. All you really need is a video device and a heck of a highspeed connection. You also have to give up any sense of ownership.
The net goes down you have no access to anything.
I can see this being feasible for the casual gaming business man, or in hotels as a room feature. The hardcore gamers will always prefer to have their own machines and their offline games.
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I flatly don't believe that latency won't be an issue over real-world connections, regardless of transfer speed. You have to send your controller input to the server. It then needs to process the input, render the next frame accordingly, and then send the graphics update back to the client (i.e., you). Everything happens server-side, then the video is streamed back to you. The result has to be much laggier than a game running locally on a machine good enough to handle the load. Compression algorithms can't be the catch-all solution for that.
In short, bullshit.
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Streaming HD content, in addition to server side processing of user input? Yea that's gonna be laggy as hell.
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Even if it was totally ultra fast and awesome, why the fuck would I want to do that?
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Remember that time we went on the free boards at IGN and all pretended to be Phantom lovers? I don't think I stopped laughing like the whole day. Good times.
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Regardless of whether this would be a good thing a bad thing or ultimately doomed to failure or great success I've got to say...
That controller is wicked badass. :P
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I like it. It's like a hybrid between the X360, PS3, and Logitech controllers.
I like the idea and the technology behind it, however in reality this is the epitome of everything we hate about Steam.
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Someone spent a lot more more time analyzing why it can't possibly work (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article) than I was willing to. Latency is where it was obvious to me in the first place, but he looks at more than that.
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I think it was when I was watching X-Play yesterday that I heard one of the creators talking, and he said that the amount of latency you would experience would be about 1ms, thanks to streamlining of how data is transferred or something like that. Sounds great, but I don't believe it.
Also I wouldn't like the idea of not owning my games. I can get on board with downloading data that I purchase and not having a physical copy, but at least I've got something. I can still play it years later just fine. OnLive sounds like a rental service like GameFly, where you have to pay a monthly fee to keep playing your games.
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I think it was when I was watching X-Play yesterday that I heard one of the creators talking, and he said that the amount of latency you would experience would be about 1ms, thanks to streamlining of how data is transferred or something like that. Sounds great, but I don't believe it.
Ha. Ping Google and tell me how long it takes for it to ping back. It's a lot more than 1 ms, I can tell you that. And that's just a ping! The only processing that is done is "Should I reply or not?" This is impossible. More impossible than the Phantom.
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That was a pretty good argument, thanks for the link Cobra.
I don't believe anything is necessarily impossible, just not yet possible.
This is probably not the most relevant but I was trying the remote play feature between my PSP and PS3 and it's pretty cool that I could stream video and audio from the PS3 to the PSP but even at ~54Mbps on WLAN the latency is very noticeable. I understand in this case it's probably due to less than perfect network code among other things but it does go along with the points in the artcle Cobra posted:
...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.
I notice enough of a delay when I'm streaming video from my PC to the PS3, with and without real-time transcoding.
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Yeah, i saw this, and while it does sound cool in concept, it seemed kind of impossible until fiber optics were widespread (i guess?). Never even thought about the hardware they'd need though - that's a whole different roadblock all together.
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Is this going to be the new Phantom? :o
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Is this going to be the new Phantom? :o
What is this thing, the Phantom 2?
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Shit, I miss'd that.
I just got so 0wn3d...
Not like it ain't been the first time....
That's for freakin' sure...
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Maybe by 2013? (http://www.joystiq.com/2009/04/02/crytek-believes-streaming-games-will-be-viable-in-2013/#comments) I think even that is optimistic. This is joystiq, so grain of salt recommended.
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Thread resurrection a-la-D.
Has anyone tried this? There's a free trial going on right now, and I mean free. No credit card info, just email, username and password. But only in the contiguous United States. You get a client to download. Run it. (I had to track down wlanapi.dll to make it work, or install the SP3 to WinXP. I chose the easier first solution.) It works, but horribly on this laptop. Some people are claiming that it's usable even on netbooks. The biggest problem seems to be that the mouse drivers in this piece of shit Vaio do not get the uber-priority that they should. I'm used to mouse input never getting bogged down, and here it always gets bogged down when a lot of I/O is going on. How the whole thing works seems to be exactly what we surmised. Your input is sent to the server, and the server returns a frame as some sort of high-quality compressed video. Res is at least 1024 across on this system. It does degenerate into squares (macroblocks) when data streaming gets hitchy. And hitch it does. It got so bad for a while that it dropped out of the game I was trying, threatening to disconnect. But it came back, and I kept trying to play through the mess.
The trial was for Darksiders. 30 minutes in the game, apparently the full one. I really want to play it on a workable platform now. That looks awesome. So yeah, it seems like you can try out all those games for a limited time. It's worth a look-see, if you can do it for no money. I'll try it on my PC when I go back to my mother's, see if it does any better. Latency clearly is going to be present regardless. But you can't beat free entertainment, even if laggy.
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Heh... kind of a coincidence but I actually looked at OnLive today as well for some reason. I haven't tried it but just by looking at the lineup of games it has, this doesn't look promising yet until they get more support for it.
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Well, that's certainly interesting. I'd like to hear how it performs on different hardware.
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Just downloaded the client. I'll give it a shot and let you know.
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Well, it is basically like Cobra said. You can tell it comes across as basically a compressed video. It's not the super-crisp look that many of us have come to expect from PC games, but it's not horrible. On my PC with my connection, I never got any blockiness. There is definite mouse lag. It's not too maddening, but it's there and is kind of annoying.
But I will say that the service has a lot of promise. There is this section called "Arena" where you see little live thumbnails of other people playing games on the service and you can click on them and watch them live and give them thumbs up or thumbs down if you want. It's pretty cool.
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If it weren't for the inherent lag and possible throughput issues, it would really be something. (Your advertised bandwidth needs to be continuous. Obviously, there can't be any buffering here, as with streaming movies.) I found out about its state of development on the Borderlands boards. One guy was bragging about playing it on a netbook. I saw that it was offered on the service, but I had forgotten what Onlive was. Then old memories filtered through the dust. It could be a very good thing for games that aren't real-time. Let's play Civilization 5 on a phone.
Still haven't tried it here. Maybe I will later today, if the predicted weather doesn't rip away power or the internet.
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Wow, I think we all really underestimated the reality of this whole thing. They are actually coming out with the hardware:
http://www.onlive.com/game-system?utm_content=MCLaunch_Members&utm_campaign=OGS+Launch&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email
I think it's a pretty cool concept. For me the lag isn't too bad. I had fun with Just Cause 2. But the service is pricey in my opinion. $20-40 for a game you don't really own (and can remove from their service at any time based on some of the wording I've read) and like $5 for a three-day pass. I guess if you play a game hardcore for three days and beat it, it's not too bad. The presentation of the service is excellent, but the selection is thin and the pricing is a bit out of whack for my tastes. It would be better if they just had a subscription where you could pay something like $20 or $30 monthly and be able to play any game for any length of time.
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Well, it seems they listened and the service is even cheaper than what I would have expected based on their other pricing: $9.99/mo. for unlimited play of all games.
http://blog.onlive.com/2010/12/02/onlive-playpack-all-you-can-game-for-9-99month/
Edit: It turns out there is a catch. The PlayPack (the monthly unlimited plan) doesn't include new releases.
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Scott W. Sander?
This was from your cell wasn't it? :P
Anyway, 10 bucks a month is really amazing even if you don't get the new releases.
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How long before a "new release" becomes not "new?" I mean in terms of OnLive's definition and time line.
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Scott W. Sander?
This was from your cell wasn't it? :P
Anyway, 10 bucks a month is really amazing even if you don't get the new releases.
Lol.
I have a pretty original username, right?
No. Sadly I am too lazy to configure my e-mail programs to put that as my signature, so I type it manually at the end of almost every e-mail I send. Since I posted that while I'm here at work where I send a ton of e-mail daily...
How long before a "new release" becomes not "new?" I mean in terms of OnLive's definition and time line.
I don't know. A year maybe? Here is a quote from that link I posted:
For example, NBA 2K11 just came out, so NBA 2K10 has been added to the PlayPack.
.
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Only 14 titles for PlayPack? That's weak. (http://www.onlive.com/playpack)
Although some of those games are pretty good.
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So much for OnLive making consoles obsolete - or anything else, for that matter...
IGN -> OnLive could be closing by end of the day. (http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/17/onlive-possibly-being-closed-by-end-of-day)
GameSpy -> OnLive says you won't be losing your games, if you bought any from them - the service will continue... (http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/122/1225789p1.html)
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OnLive was actually acquired by . . . someone. The whole story up to now has been deliberately obfuscated because of the deal taking place at the time. I'll see if I can find a decent link . . .
Here goes. (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/OnLive-Cloud-Gaming-Acquired-Will-Continue-Operations-Report-786906/)
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I think the assets were acquired by someone but I don't think the company will exist in the same capacity it has. The staff was laid off.
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I think OnLive could have seriously benefited from being a service available to current hardware. Imagine if it was an app on PS3 or X360? Of course that option would be in Sony and Microsoft's hands.
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It's kind of a shame it didn't work out. It was a promising service with a really nice interface. Too bad it is not possible to overcome the latency issue with current technology.
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It's kind of a shame it didn't work out. It was a promising service with a really nice interface. Too bad it is not possible to overcome the latency issue with current technology.
Is that why they shut down? If so, that's funny, since THAT was the main concern, and you think they'd have the answer for it to have rolled the dice with such a heavy bet on the table.
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It's kind of a shame it didn't work out. It was a promising service with a really nice interface. Too bad it is not possible to overcome the latency issue with current technology.
That's the reason I am not sorry to see them go South. But I don't think it's the reason they failed. I think that's more along the lines of big hardware and software companies realizing they can do the same thing themselves, should they ever want to; so why license their IP to a 3rd party to stream it?
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CLOUD gaming as a requirement = FAILURE.
As an extra option, CLOUD service features sounds nice - especially if you're out of HDD space; just don't need to lug your saves around on disc or flash drives; or for those who are on the go.
But, if I "buy" a game, I should be able to have my game-installers be able to saved anywhere (HDD, DVD discs, BR discs, whatever); be able to install the game locally to my HDD; and play it whenever the hell I want.