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New Service Aims To Replace Consoles With Cloud Gaming
ThinSkin writes "Imagine playing bleeding-edge games, yet never again upgrading your hardware. That's the ambitious goal of OnLive's Internet delivered gaming service. Using cloud computing, OnLive's goal is to 'make all modern games playable on any system,' thanks in large part to OnLive's remote servers that do all the heavy lifting. With a fast enough Internet connection, gamers can effectively stream and play games using a PC, Mac, or a 'MicroConsole,' 'a dedicated gaming client provided by OnLive that includes a game controller.' Without ever having to worry about costly hardware upgrades or the cost of a next-gen console, gamers can expect to fork over about $50 yearly just for the service. If this thing takes off, this can spell trouble for gaming consoles down the road, especially if already-established services like Steam and Impulse join the fray."
It's all fun and games (no pun intended) until you've been playing for a couple of hours and used up the whole of your monthly bandwidth allowance.
I know that some people have the option of truely unlimited service, but an awful lot don't and that puts this service out of their reach.
About as ambitious as the plot to Anti-Trust.
The 'microconsole' will be hacked to have GNU/Linux and other FLOSS OSs installed within the first few weeks. Hardware geeks everywhere the device is offered sign up for a gaming service only to hack the subsidized hardware and then drop the subscription as soon as legally feasable. ...like every other time someone thought to subsidize commodity PC hardware (or something based upon it) with a subscription model.
Article also talks about "no piracy because it's not running locally."
That's cute, I suppose latency might be a real pain then?
Instead of normal online game lag, you have lag between you actually pressing a button and the game responding at the server.
Even a tiny amount in this situation would make the game 'feel' unresponsive.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
lagging in online games ruins it for me. If hooking a console up to a tv input card on your computer introduces too much lag, how can this possibly be playable?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
How does cloud computing solve the CPU-GPU bandwidth issues of modern games? Gamers still want to see the game, and at ultra high rez & IQ.
Cloud gaming? Sounds like vaporware to me...
This guy's the limit!
I recall to have heard stories like this years back regarding at least 2 other similar projects.
All of them ended up being nothing more than a story on the net and a alpha prototype on CeBit.
Sorry to say, I'll believe it when I see it in the wild.
Just like when Microsoft years back announced a new gaming platform in developement, where games worked on all types of machines and consoles regardless of their hardware (read Xbox, PS2, Mac and PC).
I have seen systems like this before, its nothing really new or interesting, seems like they simply took and old idea and slapped cloud computing on it to make it sound new and hip. The previous attempts that I have seen on this front all looked promising when they started, however once live, all failed miserably due to various system issues (Lag, wait times, copyright issues, technological issues, etc..).
If these guys can pull it off, kudos to them, and a job well done, but, I can't help but be a skeptic on this one.
Fuck the cloud! I don't want all my gaming delivered down the pipe as a metered "service". I like owning hardware, and having the ability to play games without being hooked up to a subscriber model.
Internet gaming is often subject to ISP drop-outs and traffic shaping. Why would I willingly embrace single-player gaming in the same poor environment?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_(game_system)
*whistles innocently*
Hey, great Idea! But, Does anyone else notice a problem with this? If all rendering is done on the servers, how fast of a framerate would you get from downloading each frame on a standard DSL/Cable connection?
To render a frame locally, it takes 1ms. To render and download a frame from the server, will take anywhere between 25ms to 250ms on a good connection. I say good luck with that.
Internet broadband in North America is really pathetic in comparison to the rest of the industrialized world. Canada and the U.S. are falling rapidly behind in broadband penetration and performance.
How is this service supposed to work reliably in such an environment?
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This would be restricted to single player games huh? No way am I uploading that info and downloading a stream while also playing on a full 32 person server.
Once decent enough pipes hit a large enough audience, all PC's / Consoles simply become a thin client to the cloud. Piracy will be eliminated as there never will be any actual software distribution. You pay the monthly fee to get access to your game of choice, you have access. You don't? Sorry, no more access. Just a world full of dumb terminals
How about user maps and mods and LAN play?
talking about lag LAN play is still much better then on line play even if you have a low ping.
If the far-end is doing all the "hard work", that makes the front-end nothing more then a dummy terminal. How on earth do they expect to stream that kind of imaging data to every console? It's a little differnt when it's TV and you're sending everyone the same thing. I can't even imagine how awful the latency will be. On consoles you don't notice it *as* much because it all looks real-time on your screen, even though you might be a half-secon behind the server, but with this, that delay would be translated on your screen. Imagine trying to navigate a map with complicated movements and every action you perform is lagged by a half second or more. It seems trivial, but it reality it would probably be very disorienting.
Except that you're waiting for the server to render your next frame. It will be like watching a youtube video that cuts out every few seconds to buffer.
How much bandwidth does it take to stream down my extra 8 gigs of RAM and 2 gig Nvidia 198000 GTXZZZ video card to play the latest Cry engine games?
They want me to pay $50 a year for it. Then they want me to pay for games separately (assuming Steam is supposed to join) via download. This sounds exactly like the current XBox model. What is different or revolutionary about this?
On top of that, the games already stretch the hardware to the limit, so where are we getting this extra computing power?
How do they exactly plan on getting over the graphics rendering and control response hurdles that do not respond well to lag let alone network lag.
This is fail. Next please.
At a modest resolution of 1024x768 and a playably smooth 25fps, we're talking 20Mbps bandwidth uncompressed. Adding compression to the mix will reduce the overhead sure, but seriously sacrifice the image quality. I don't believe the internet infrastructure could support more than even a handful of gamers in the same street playing lag free, not to mention being totally prohibitively expensive for those on metered or 'traffic shaped' broadband solutions. It's a nice idea (old) idea though.
I love how their network diagram in that article states "Low-latency HD video". As if it's a new technology. Wow, you have low-latency! I didn't even know that was out.
This is a pipe dream until they can prove this works. I want to see physical tests, not PR.
People like me like their gaming on their own terms. It's how I watch TV, it's how I game.
I rarely play online games mostly for that reason [that and I hate most other online gamers]. When I have 30 mins to spare in my evening, I just want to turn on the console and play. Not hope there are other players around, or that the "cloud server" is up to process my requests, or my net connection fast enough to cope.
Just turn the damn box on, play, turn it off.
What they *could* do is start working towards standardized APIs so that the different companies could compete on the merits of their hardware decisions, and not their proprietary software lockin.
There is no reason why an OpenGL stack wouldn't work on both the PS3 and Xbox360. I don't know if they use it in fact, but I doubt it. As a result, you have games that require companies to write their own portable stacks [or, more likely, suffer vendor lockin as it's too costly].
And for fuck sake, can we go 2 weeks without "cloud" computing floating around?
It's a nonsense idea right up there with "every workstation will be a dumb terminal" notion. Some^H^H^H^H most of the time having resources local as opposed to remote is more beneficial.
Duke Nukem Forever will be a launch game for this plataform.
Even the slightest bit of lag will make this unusable. Imagine playing something like Street Fighter or any game that requires you to make cat like reflexes, it just won't work. It'll probably be OK for something like a point and click game such as Monkey Island, but trying to pull off one of those lengthy combos in Street Fighter IV's Trial Challenge just isn't going to happen.
Maybe in 20 years?
Summation 2
640p games will be a thing of the past.
Finally game designers will be able to select larger world size, add more monsters and use HD texture sizes.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
no matter what the content is, if you don't have a powerful enough GPU, than you can't play the game at the speeds other people play it at.
Yes, a X1900, or NVIDIA 2700 is the mid level for now. Once the next gen graphics and content come out, you need to go higher. Taking no one or 2, but 3 steps higher for a card to last 3 to 5 years.
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
this is completely un-feasible until we all have ultra low latency gigabit fibres to our homes. even then, it's still a stupid idea.
try powering (and cooling) a server rendering 64 screens of high resolution game image at 60 frames per second, as well as processing AI and input. the daily cost of such an operation would be monumentally high.
Am I the only one who's tired of hearing that buzzword being thrown around like it actually means something?
I've had enough trouble tunneling X11 over a LAN, streaming a game [what does that mean, video??] over the Internet will not work for a long time. There is way too much latency.
Even playing something turn-based would be a pain in the ass because you have to wait for each button press to reach the server and echo back before you can do anything else.
A lot of these demos look impressive but what's going to happen in the real world? ISPs in the US suck as far as reliability (especially cable. I'm looking at you Comcast.) I can play a game I own the hardware for pretty much whenever I want. OK maybe not if it's a game that's based on network connectivity, but not everything is MMORPG.
Maybe lag won't be an issue, but even if it's what might be small for a low intensity game, if I'm playing a twitch shooter I don't know if I want to rely on the latency between me and a datacenter 1000 miles away that's going through a bunch of hops on the interwebs.
I hope they succeed. It could be sweet but I have my doubts.
just like the phantom game console did!
It's like Sega Channel 2009! Sweet.
What, me Tweet?
It is so utterly, utterly unlike an MMORPG that I can only assume that your comment was the result of a cat walking across the keyboard. I realise the probability of a cat hitting the keys necessary to compose such a message are vanishingly small, but I prefer to believe that over facing the possibility that people with such poor reading comprehension skills are allowed to use computers unsupervised.
Yeah, you won't even get to watch people running in place when the server flakes out on you.
I'm sure that this new system from Microsoft will work flawlessly with my PS2 running Lunix!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
..like what the phantom would have been if all the intensive stuff was ran on a server. Interestesting, but I would rather have an actual console to play my games. This would be fun for xbox arcade like games but, nothing really 3d intensive.
Cloud seems to be a very popular buzz word recently.
I bet that it would kind of a dream for many people as it provides them with steady money income (it would be something like xbox live that you have to pay for access to it) and would have no piracy (if you don't run it on your hardware you don't require copy of game). No way to resell disc with game, no way to lend disc to your friend.
However, some limitations would have to be overcome first. Speed of light isn't that high you it's about electronics and internet is still not the most reliable thing under the sun (it's often for me that one day you tube video plays like a dream but other day it buffers and buffers and buffers).
My Windows is NOT slow, it's special!
The US and just about the entire world is in a deep recession and possibly a depression. I don't know about you but I aim to reduce my monthly bills. That means... drop my nEhannced Digital TV service,
go with basic cable + internet instead. I dropped my
phone landline carrier, switched to Vonage, dropped my private cellphone... I use my employer supplied cell phone for emergencies. Paid off our credit card debt.. 0 balance. traded in my awd honda elemen, got a 2009 pontiac vibe gt, dropped XM radio.. I listen to my IPOD in my car anyway. I don't want to pay a monthly service for gaming. I might play games 2 days out of a month that is it. I've got a life. I'm not going to pay $10/month to paly games. If I want to play a game I'll play a free openesource game on my linux
desktop or a free game on my wii.
This is the distant future but we are living in the present. Its a great idea and cloud services will run games, media stuff or anything else in the future for sure. games are the hardest nuts to crack - we don't have sufficient hardware and most importantly network capabilities to be able to offer this service with quality comparable to any game console. the main point would be the lag I would say plus bandwidth will be too much. The other factor is that this economy needs to profit from hardware - its not the right time for this.
The difference is huge, actually WoW could be played with this service the difference would be you can basically have an pc that is below the minimum requirements of the game and still play it on high end settings and a high resolution without any issues. That is the whole idea behind this, basically the game is run on a very high end pc then only the video is streamed to you so you move all the cpu, gpu, memory etc requirements to only bandwidth requirement. Of course this concept will have many issues to overcome one and most important one is to be able to ALWAYS be able to provide enough low latency bandwidth to you in order to keep the game lag free.
*whoooooooosh*
In case you didn't get that, that was the sound of sarcasm flying past you.
I got a sense of vapour product from the article - but I'm tired so I might of missed something.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
the only way such a system can work is if pre emptive AI becomes a whole lot better than it is at the moment. Pre emptive AI is the reason why, in multiplayer games, other players will appear to jump around, the computer tries to predict what other players will do, then corrects play later if it was wrong. This we can usually live with, the effect is less noticable with players further away from you within the game. For this system to work it would have to show you how it pre empts your own reactions which with the current state of pre emptive AI would make a fast paced game almost unplayable.
Blazing Spiders
As a brazilian, i'm proud to introduce to the slashdot comunity the first brazilian video game console, 100% online content distibution: http://www.zeebo.com.br . From Tectoy, former SEGA distibutor in Brazil.
My latency in gaming online is already bad enough on my 5 meg cable. Ever try playing a driving game online. LOL. Disconnects and uber lag should be this services tag line. As mentioned in another post above, input lag time will also be a serious issue they will have to overcome. If they are streaming HD Video as the game, real time input will not exist.
Not so sure that it works though.
However, this is exactly how it should be, provided that they actually do it right.
Early reports guarantee this will be a huge hit and will be released ahead of schedule!
Lots of comments here about potential roadblocks, stutters and genuine questions about viability. I'll leave that to everyone else, and just say this:
If this works (and time will tell), for fifty bucks a year, all in, I'm buying. It's that simple.
And so will everyone else. Like I said, maybe there are issues ... I don't know. But there is a huge potential for a paradigm shift here, and let there be no doubt that these guys will have all the heavyweights breathing down their necks. Lawsuits on one side, competing services on the other. Someone, eventually, will win out, though.
Hopefully gamers will chose the lesser of the evils, the truly bad choices have to admit defeat and give up, and we're left with a win for the consumer, for a change.
I don't really know why, but for some reason this reminds me of the old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."
I was looking for somewhere to attach this comment, and you're it.
"Cloud" is the modern term for a mainframe, time-sharing-like model.
One advantage is that your data lives on a server somewhere, meaning someone else is responsible for backup, and you can access it from any "terminal" (typically a web browser, but could also be things like the Steam client).
Another advantage is a potential pricing model for developers -- Amazon EC2 charges per hour of server time used, at a very flat rate. If you only use an hour, you only pay ten cents.
The big advantage of an infrastructure like EC2 is shown in pathological cases, like websites which tend to receive more traffic at certain times of the day. So every night, you can shut down whatever capacity you don't need, and stop paying for it -- and Amazon can then allocate it to someone else who needs it at that time, possibly overnight.
At a different level, you see the same pattern with web applications -- you don't need a computer more powerful than it needs to be to run Firefox. The server can do whatever computing you need that isn't already happening locally -- but most GUI apps spend a lot of time waiting for the user. So when you do a search in Gmail, that takes some server CPU -- but while you're examining the results, that server is off running someone else's search.
Here's the problem: None of these advantages apply to these guys.
The "my data is elsewhere" advantage is irrelevant. Steam already provides this. So long as I remember a username and password, I can download all my Steam games, along with all their savegames and settings.
The idea that a piece of hardware might not fully be utilized by a single user, and could thus be re-allocated, is similarly irrelevant here. Unless they have some sort of weird economies of scale where one video card can serve a thousand users, and cost less than a thousand times the cost of one normal video card... they're pretty much stuck with one machine per gamer.
And since these machines will have to be geographically close to the gamer to be at all viable, there's going to be very little gain from half the gamers going to sleep just as the other half wakes up. You're still going to get the bulk of your traffic from large groups of gamers coming home and logging in at about the same time.
The only advantage is the not-having-to-think-about-maintenance bit, which is pretty weak against consoles. A console is something even John Q. Gamer can unpack and plug in himself. Having to do it every four years is really not that big a deal.
So that's a very long way of saying: I agree with you, "cloud" is being abused. This is clearly someone trying to cash in on the buzzword, without really understanding what it's good for -- it would be like creating an XML representation of a waveform from a sound file.
This doesn't mean XML is worthless, or that it lacks meaning. It just means that someone drank a little too much kool-aid.
Similarly, "cloud computing", as vague as it can be, is really about a couple of related concepts that are concrete enough to write down. This is just something that it's really not suited for.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It seems to me that the limitations of this would be astronomical in terms of what you could play. I have seen games run via cloud computing methods that have been compiled for such a use, however that is a very significant and difficult task, especially if you have to reverse-engineer or cross over to make a game function in such a way.
Furthermore, bandwidth is the real issue here. Yes, the majority of us have broadband internet, but this gets very tricky when we factor in packet shaping, especially for peak hours. Playing games that are very time-flexible are almost un-noticeable, but when you attempt to play an FPS game that requires SLI/Crossfire to run at max settings, you're talking about a LOT of data. If you did the "heavy lifting" server side, you would still have to transmit that data out, which I'm assuming is going to be the real choking point. If the data can cross from server-to-user with just a couple hundred ms of latency, they will have a fighting chance, otherwise it's just a waste of time.
- Then the game companies get the server shut down. - Then the pirates move the server to country with more relaxed copyright laws. - Then game companies get ISPs to block access to the server. - Then the pirate server uses encrypted packets, etc. - Then blocking software gets smarter. - Then ...
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure beg to differ.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
I realise I'm oversimplifying this a bit but what you're suggesting is:
Games over VNC. (or other similar technology, e.g. RDP, X-Windows protocols etc.)
Okay. No problem with that. You can even do 3D acceleration with local hardware running remote programs, vice versa and all sorts of fancy stuff. The problem, though, is the next logical step they have taken:
Games over VNC via the Internet.
Not being funny but on a bog-standard DSL business line communicating with a bog-standard DSL consumer line, if my VNC isn't in one of the ridiculously limited colour modes and high compression, it struggles. Sure, I can do 24-bit colour etc. but my FPS drop even on an empty-ish desktop. Both lines are capable of 8MBps and both touch that in real life, on idle networks, and both have 2Mbps upstream.
So their claim of "only 1.5Mbps" is pushing it a bit for "real-time" traffic, especially if they are relying on MPEG compression of highly-graphical scenes. Now, I *can* stream movies and TV-shows from the Internet at phenomenal rates and I can get full-screen (non-HD), full motion video quite easily. However, I usually have at least a 5-second buffer on such things because otherwise it gets about a second into the stream and then just stutters constantly. I assume that's because trying to do "real-time" streaming is much, much, much harder than just streaming a video by brute force.
You can *already* demonstrate this with VideoLAN and some sticky tape if you can be bothered - you can stream anything but trying to keep it in synch requires a lot more bandwidth and effort than just the video and normally relies on heavy buffering and synching "in the past" (i.e. buffer 5 seconds ahead at all times, but just co-ordinate what frame should be shown *now*). That can't happen on a real-time-response game, and as pointed out by many, the latencies are already horrendous once you get out onto the net (the best latency I get to a remote location is about 10-15ms, and that's not even leaving my ISP).
It's a wonderful idea, it really is. But if it was remotely plausible, Nintendo would have done it with their Wii originally, had it as a bolt-on, or be announcing it for their successor. Wii is the perfect machine for this - network connected, in the home, connected to the TV, payment infrastructure already in place, online gaming, games are quite small and downloadable, little backing storage to reduce costs, etc. You could even offload the GL parts to the local hardware rather than trying to create a super-server somewhere just yet (there's a version of X-Windows that can do this already). But the fact is that it would be *fantastic* for something like, say, a gaming cybercafe. And then it's usefulness stops dead. And in that sort of arena, you're looking at it being orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to just slap a real computer on each seat.
I wouldn't even like to THINK of the 3D calculations and rendering that would have to be done for even a simple point-and-shoot running over the Internet from 16 or 32 different points of view, the MPEG'ing the result and then trying to stream it to 32 different people in under, say, 50ms. Sure, you can just build a server farm packed full of GPU's, but you're looking at one GPU per simultaneous customer, and it would have to be able to handle quite modern games and be upgraded constantly. Then the infrastructure (bandwidth alone! 1.5Mbps to each simultaneous online customer. Wow!), codec licensing, etc. You'd never be able to even do it for $29.99 a month, even if it was terrible and you had to cutback.
Just the bandwidth - a 1.5Mbps, uncacheable, non-multicastable stream to, say, 2000 simultaneous users - that would be 3Gbps.
According to my ISP, quite a large ISP owned by British Telecom now, the iPlayer application is a big bandwidth problem for them.
http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/08/19/online-o
The whole point of their technology is to render the graphics on a server running at their company, and stream the rendered graphics as a HD video stream.
Thus the client doesn't require 3D capability, just the capability to play the video stream.
Think of this as playing a game over something like VNC.
The problem are obvious, though : HD video stream for each player ? With limited to no lag ? Within the bandwidth limits ? No way.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'd like to see a top line game played this way in Australia with our crappy connections and if the mandatory internet filter gets adopted it will be less possible. Living in the Aussie bush I'd be lucky to be able to play the old pong game.
"A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist" - Sir Humphrey Appleby
Sounds about as fun as having my teeth extracted without anesthesia, and then re-inserted to be taken out again tomorrow....
I think I'll stick to playing motocross on my Intelivision.
-Oz
*WHOOSH!*
A joke just flew directly over your head. Nice "reading comprehension skills".
Comcast triple play will take on a whole new meaning. It will still totally suck.
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
Not!
Show me Crysis running on this and I will be impressed.
Wait, any game on any setup, so under that token, I can run Crysis effectively on a CRT Television.
Hahahaha, if I want to play a NES game, I will play a NES game. If I want graphics that punch me in the face, I use a real computer, not a fakie box
An ex-coworker of mine went to work for a similar startup. I'm not sure if it was this company, but very similar. Anyway, I made the exactly same questions about latency and bandwidth everyone here makes. The answer was interesting.
This service was not even meant to compete with consoles and PCs. Instead, the real competition were those TV game shows where you play with text messages or calling the station and controlling the game with phone number keys. I, or no one of you, would never play one of those but there sure are a lot of people who do.
If they manage to stay in business until technology advances to the point where real games over internet are possible, they should be ahead of possible competition. The overall quality will still be well below local dedicated hardware, but tolerable enough for really casual gamers.
I'm still not sure this will fly, though.
or the bandwidth/lag of this but rather, how does it compare with something like Corquet that's a decentralized version, and how soon can we make something like .hack's The World.
And yet, many big name companies are able to stream HD quality video over the internet
Sure - because they buffer the content on your end, and you don't notice the lag between frame sent and frame displayed. Additionally, the content is pre-rendered. Netflix's "Instant" option sure looks instant to me, because when I click "play" I overlook the few seconds of buffer loading while I settle into a comfy chair, and that's not even considering the additional delay of render time.
It's not a matter of getting HD images to you. It's a matter of getting HD images constructed and delivered and displayed within about 1/30th of a second of you pressing a button. Big urban bandwidth & lag is fine for delivering HD video, but not this-split-second gaming images. There's a big difference between direct CPU-to-GPU-to-display lag vs. CPU-to-ISP-to-renderfarm-to-ISP-to-CPU-to-display lag, as in orders of magnitude.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The whole concept is laughable. Realtime HD compression and streaming? Low enough latencies to make it work?
It's simply *impossible* for the foreseeable future. The only games this would be good for are slow and graphically simple casual puzzle games and the experience would still be significantly worse than what's available today. Worse than even the free flash games a la popcap that everyone who has a computer can play.
This is just a scheme to defraud gullible investors. Period.
FTFA ""This is the last major console cycle," Perlman said. "If not this one, then definitely the next one." So which is it? This sounds like a steaming cloud of vapor. Also, check out the link to the painfully vague Rearden Labs video http://www.reardenlabs.com/ from the developer of the service. Remember, Rearden and the Objectivists don't mind selling you nothing at all as long as they benefit. When there's a real world video I'll be more inclined to believe this but for now it's Phantom Version 2. Kudos to whoever convinced a firm to give them capital in this recession though.
I file this akin to those lodgenet gaming systems in hotel rooms. Sure they work, but no one except 7 year old kids play them. Last I checked, the gaming market for 7 year olds isn't doing too hot.
This is going to be a darling to all those MBAs until the 6 customers who use the service, and that's what it is, (software-as-a-service), decide to drop it once the cloud suffers a hiccup and you can't play.
Otherwise, you're essentially delivering video that you can control via the X protocol or vnc or something similar. We all know how those systems fail regularly due to normal net congestion and traffic.
What I'm saying is, gamers will not use this service. We like our hardware and we collect it to play our games. The hardware manufacturers should be worried about lost sales.
Game publishers should be shitting in their pants at the notion of this. No more sales? After all, you can't charge $60 for rental access to a game.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I say we get thousands of people to run Crysis on their cloud. Either it will be unplayably slow, or we bring down their machines in a new form of "Slashdotted".
Either way, lesson learned.
And having used that, I can tell you it's not feasible in the way they suggest. Sure you can remote play FFVII in the bathroom, but it's not full 100% speed and quality.
I think this already exists in the form of "Skype Darts". Essentially you set up Skype at two locations, focusing the webcam on a dart board. Each player then tosses the dart in an attempt to score points.
What's great is that the billions of physics calculations needed to perform accurate dart-throwing (taking into account wind resistance, muscle fatigue, and other factors), are outsourced to the external site. In this way, "Reality" is able to accurately simulate the dart game, down to the molecular level. This is all streamed to the other player in real-time, with very little lag.
Every game will be playable for as short as the company feels like supporting it.
Fixed^W emphasis-shifted that for you.
I don't want my games to fail when everybody else stops paying the guys who sold it to me. I want them to be playable forever.
Starcraft is still big in Korea. I recently watched Bisu v. Best and Bisu v. Jaedong; Blizzard probably isn't making money off of monthly Starcraft subscriptions since those don't exist, yet some companies find it worth their money to sponsor big Starcraft events (thanks, SK Telekom T1, but I can't really use the Korean telephone system in Denmark; sorry).
Who knew back in the nineties that it would be this big, and stay this big? And apparently, Bisu and Jaedong don't have compatibility problems.
I vote for control.
...me! My Magnavox Odyssey 2 will finally be better than *your* gaming platform. Ha!
...to balance the obvious flaws and substantial criticism it's receiving here (which is justified - there are a lot of technology shortfalls at present).
Playing a game in this manner could potentially eliminate cheating. If the processing is all done remotely from the player, and the only legal inputs allowed from the player are button presses/mouse clicks etc. then you have a pretty secure game. No more third party software letting players speedhack or duplicate items. This assumes of course that the game code is resistant to anything that tries to cheat through macro-like button presses or anything that manipulates the allowed inputs. Hmmmm, now I think about it, I'm pretty sure people would find a way to exploit even such a restricted system. The desire to cheat is strong indeed...
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
something you'd find on the Syfy channel. HA! As if such a channel would even exist!
I've been saying for a few years now, this is the future of "console" gaming.
Not now though.
In 10 years we will have such blazingly fast internet, (thanks to optical relays that make this possible--look it up) that there will be no benefit to a box sitting under your TV with limited horsepower.
Let the server calculate everything and stream you a real-time render. All your "console" has to do is display the stream and send back your controller's input.
A game will be able to evolve and improve as the developers see fit. Upgrade the server, not the console.
1. Ever wonder why youtube is not blue ray quality?
1a. If so, then you're a moron.
2. Ever wonder why we can't stream PS3 quality games over the internet?
2a. See 1a
Wooo first post! Yeah!
If this takes off... then that ps3, xbox360, or wii, is the next ps4,xbox720, and wii22.
They'll just charge for the firmware upgrade with no client hardware expense.
Then you'll have to buy the games with their service.... oops i mean rent the games... at most probably the exact same price as the retail versions... and be stuck paying 50$ a year to have the priviledge of not losing the right to play the games you paid for...
People keep saying this system will prevent cheating, but there are still several avenues of cheating possible. Doing so requires either A> hacking the box or B> inserting a device between the box and the internet (possibly as simple as a second ethernet card in your pc, or a local network on which your pc is sniffing and injecting packets).
Possible man-in-the-middle attacks include aimbots (recognize pattern, send inputs that place crosshair over pattern and fire), better-than-human macros (think auto-combos for fighting games), automation (botting in resource-gathering games), etc.
This certainly would eliminate some very common and troublesome cheats, but there's still a lot of stuff it wouldn't stop.
You seem to be assuming that this service will stream VIDEO to your unit, but with TFA not being too clear on the subject
Actually, the article is quite clear:
The secret sauce to making OnLive work is its proprietary, on-the-fly video compression capability. As you're playing the game, the outgoing frame buffers are compressed as a video stream and sent to your local client. Perlman estimates that servers need to be within 1,000 miles of a client, at a maximum, to maintain latencies low enough to ensure playability. User data, such as inputs and commands, will be sent back over the Internet, but those usually consist of fairly small data packets.
Of course, a broadband connection is required. For standard definition (480p) resolutions, users will need a minimum of 1.5 megabits/sec. A 5 megabits/sec connection will support high definition (720P or 1080i) connections. Initially, the service won't support 1080p or higher resolutions, but that may come later.
We got some hands on with Company of Heroes, and the game certainly seemed to play well on a standard MacBook Pro (running Windows Vista, ironically). We were sitting at the Rearden Steel offices in Palo Alto. According the McGarvey, the server hosting the game was running in Santa Clara, about fifteen miles down the road. Although we only played for a few minutes, there was no visible lag or other latency issues. Of course, fifteen miles isn't 1,000 miles, and the servers didn't have thousands of users trying to run at the same time.
The article also states that it only requires 1.5 mb connection for 480p and 5mb for 720p and 1080i. Just really good proprietary video compression software.
Maybe if I keep posting quotes from the article, people will read it.
The secret sauce to making OnLive work is its proprietary, on-the-fly video compression capability. As you're playing the game, the outgoing frame buffers are compressed as a video stream and sent to your local client. Perlman estimates that servers need to be within 1,000 miles of a client, at a maximum, to maintain latencies low enough to ensure playability. User data, such as inputs and commands, will be sent back over the Internet, but those usually consist of fairly small data packets.
Of course, a broadband connection is required. For standard definition (480p) resolutions, users will need a minimum of 1.5 megabits/sec. A 5 megabits/sec connection will support high definition (720P or 1080i) connections. Initially, the service won't support 1080p or higher resolutions, but that may come later.
lodgenet has the game hardware and movies on site / in the box so bandwidth and lag is not as bad as some thing like this is.
So assuming this is technically viable - instead of forking over $200-300 every four years to corporation A, you'll be forking over $50-75 every year to corporation B. No one is trying to save the gamer's money, it's just different people trying to take it.
I know that, but my point was, who plays the games on lodgenet? little kids who whine to their parents.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I've considered streaming the contents of my 2-gpu gaming PCs frame buffer over gigabit connection to my linux netbook. Even with a gigabit link you have the latency of rendering the frame quickly, compressing, transfering, decompressing, rendering to destination monitor. Usually, the 30-40ms between the movement of the mouse/keyboard and a frame being rendered to the screen is not a huge step over the 40ms it takes for your eye to see the light. Add another 100ms overhead and suddenly games like a FPS aren't fun anymore. Hell using a remote desktop for basic tasks through a laggy connection isn't fun.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Boy you people really live in a bubble don't you? Do you understand the number of people with *extremely* old computers who can't possibly play any games released in the last few years, regardless of what settings they use? There are those who religiously buy/build new computers every year or 2, and then there are those many, many more people who don't feel like spending money and fussing with their equipment or configurations. They end up only using their computer for old-school indie games or simplistic flash-based games. The market for this kind of technology is *huge*.
Still rendering the frame on the client machine, and some gameplay logic, such that the user gets instant response to movements and inputs. On the big iron servers process:
Ultra-real global illumination.
Complicated physics for environment.
Advanced game AI, for game actors.
Streaming sound/music.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
They forgot to mention the first few games will be gems like 7th guest.
GameSpot have a video of the presentation that the link in the OP is summarising (53mins).
Personally I can't fathom how they can get good quality 720p down a connection 1/3 (5Mbps) of what would be needed for MPEG2 (15Mbps). Nor how they can have low enough latency to process the controls on the server - they mention specially designed servers but they surely can't do so much better with the intertubes than gaming server hosts do already, then there's the fluctuations... I suppose we'll find out when people get onto the beta in summer.
Awesome. So you need a connection that's faster than what most people have to play games at lower resolution than most PC gamers (and many console gamers) do.
Most, but not all. Looking at the Steam Hardware Survey (the best I personally know of, but please cite better ones if you know of any), 1024 x 768 is only 1.5% less then the leading screen res of 1280 x 1024 (23.87% of results). Personally monitor will do 1600x1200, but I rarely run games at that resolution anyway.
Either way, I'm agree that it'll be interesting to see if this actually works in the real world as advertised, and how the 'average gamer' likes it.
Oh yeah, and it'll blow my bandwidth cap in about forty hours.
Well the magic is maybe they will peer up with some larger ISPs, offering special 'OnLive' service (for a small fee of course..). 'OnLive' could colo with that ISP and all the traffic stays local to that net. Maybe it would some day become just a no-fee value add.
As for b/w caps, not having to live with them, I'm spoiled I suppose; So I'm sorry for those that are stuck with them because their ISP hates their customers.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
1) Very very low client graphic requirements--all 3D rendering is done on server and is sent to client like a "custom" real-time movie.
2) Low/no entry cost of hardware.
3) Large potential game inventory; publishers will love this as it completely bypasses hardware/console middlemen.
4) Simple and convenient to use for ordinary gamer; cost saver for serious gamer. (important for the company to package up scaled subscription prices for both of these audiences)
For one thing, this will be perfect for hotel pay-per-view like arrangements.
Hey! Stop copying my sig!!! Stop copying my sig!!! Stop copying my sig!!! Stop copying my sig!!!
I actually consider myself being ahead of the curve and most of the country, definitely better off than Comcast cable, having ATT DSL with 1.5mbit down. Guess when I'd see 1.5mbit down?
Never, ever! I do see 1.2 most of the time, sometimes they drop down to 100kbit and then I'm recording the downtime for the next time I call them up.
PS: I've heard Comcast cable customers with 1.5mbit down have 600kbit typically.
"For standard definition (480p) resolutions, users will need a minimum of 1.5 megabits/sec. A 5 megabits/sec connection will support high definition (720P or 1080i) connections"
...they'd have made a small low res handheld system with a built in web connection like the Kindle, the naturally low resolution combined with the comparatively high connection speed (Compared to the resolution) would be perfect for playing current gen console games on the go. Maybe the idea isn't perfect, but it's a much better niche than going after people who are too cheap or too poor to afford a decent gaming computer or a console by offering a subscription service before the technology is there to support it.
What happens when the service goes down? (or bunkrupt, youll lose all your games...)
Also, Bandwidth limits are not getting better but worse. Having to pay 20 - 30 bucks per month more for the i-net connection will most likely discourage the average gamer they are aiming at.
besides, I love owning powerful hardware