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."

Comments

Caps

[Spad]

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.

Re:Caps

[tepples]

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.

Or if you have your video games set up at a family party, away from the Internet entirely, and you don't think an air card or a tetherable data plan is worth $720 per year.

Re:Caps

[Moryath]

Hmmm.

Anyone else reminded of The Phantom?

Re:Caps

[poetmatt]

No manner of compression will make up for the attempt to do this live. I think a 50MB/above connection might be realistic to keep things smooth, especially in high action scenes with lots of pixels changing every single frame.

I could see: part of things being handled client side and part on the server side but then we just head back to online gaming.

However, even a fiber optics line I'd have my doubts. That is, unless you want to play on a 640x480 screen all day or assume that your internet provider wouldn't packet shape this stuff down to a crawl below VOIP, as someone said a few replies down.

Where I could see this working is in a LAN environment, make some kind of "xbox360server" to host all the games as basically virtual machines across a lan, etc. However, that obviously isn't cloud in the same sense.

Re:Caps

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be assuming that this service will stream VIDEO to your unit, but with TFA not being too clear on the subject, my guess is that they will stream just 'polygons' to their 'netconsole', which then displays them as video frames. The bandwith needed should be far smaller.

The biggest difference with mmorpgs is that mmorpg servers send program data to the client, who then does most of the calculations -the hard work- and displays the results.

Also, many slashdotters seem to assume that mmorpgs require a huge bandwith. I think that's wrong. As a well known example WoW was quite playable using a 512 Kb DSL connection.

As other posters have said before, the biggest problem with On-Live's approach is the lag, which is inherent to the Internets, and will continue so for the foreseeable future. Most mmorpg clients use lots of code and processing power just to minimize the effects of lag in the gameplay, with mixed fortunes (Go to Dalaran and ask anyone :)

Re:Caps

[SanityInAnarchy]

However, even a fiber optics line I'd have my doubts.

Doing some quick calculations:

The highest number I've gotten for Blu-Ray maximum bandwidth is 54 megabits per second. I've seen torrents much smaller that still looked good.

Assuming uncapped, that's actually doable. Fiber is typically 100 mbits per second, and I'm sure some places offer gigabit.

However, encoding time is on the order of hours or days, and is certainly not live. So the real problem is latency -- take 50 ms from your LCD monitor, plus whatever a wireless controller ads, plus the latency between you and their servers, plus the lag for them to render, capture, and encode, then decode back at the client... that's easily getting up to 200 ms, which I'd consider unplayable.

Also, unless the $50/year includes games, it makes little economic sense, either. These systems are designed to last some four years or so. A Wii can be had for $160, according to a quick Google; this would be $200. A Wii can work when your Internet is down, or when your internet is not fiber. And a Wii actually has games already -- not as many as its competitors, but some.

Where I could see this working is in a LAN environment

Not really. LANs are typically 100 mbits, or if you're willing to spend money on a good switch, gigabit. Same situation as fiber.

The only advantage of a LAN is, with a good switch, you aren't using everyone else's bandwidth, but if you're proposing this:

make some kind of "xbox360server" to host all the games as basically virtual machines across a lan,

That's still likely to be a single port, which means now everyone on the LAN is limited to a combined 100 mbits for their video. It means the concept of a LAN party just got very, very impractical.

And WTF would be the point, if it's a console anyway? In what way is that "xbox360server" better than a real Xbox 360?

As for their "no piracy" claim, as a consumer, that doesn't make me want to sign up for the service. That makes me want to go far away, into the open arms of indie developers, who typically ship with reduced or no DRM.

Re:Caps

[poetmatt]

Fiber is 100mbits where? Japan? Last I heard of promises were 50mbits, and that even that was the language of "up to" not "actual/realistic". Bluray will truly use 50 megabits a second, not "up to 50". Difference there. so I agree, uncapped. However, how often have you heard of an uncapped connection? We've had capped connections longer than the issues of packet shaping. Certainly not getting better.

Lans' are 100megabits? Wha? You can buy an 8 port gig switch for 40 bucks (25 AR).

Meanwhile, I do agree with the rest of what you said. There is no real improvement here in general, I'm just saying being able to play all the games off a local network with only one host would be nice for consoles which aren't really friendly to that idea right now. Mostly because they're more locked down than any other DRM that exists. It's "you want to play more than 4 people/more than one game at once, you need more consoles".

The no piracy claim tells me that this is vaporware, really. Cloud computing as a whole is vaporware and it's own form of not so subtle DRM, remote VM's are not.

Re:Caps

[Em Emalb]

May as well reply here.

Am I the only one that actually enjoys owning hardware? I like my PS3. I like my N64. I like my Atari. I like being able to sit down in the "man cave" and play games on my large tv without having to plug in a computer to it (other than the PS3) and if I want to pause or scratch my nuts or whatever, I can.

I have FiOS at the house as well, so it's not like this would be a bad thing bandwidth-wise, but still. No thank you.

Re:Caps

[SanityInAnarchy]

Also worth mentioning: Even assuming you've got a magical encoding machine which only adds a few milliseconds to the latency, there's the simple fact that most video streamed over the Internet is done through a relatively large buffer.

In fact, Flash audio and video (Youtube and friends) seems to just download as much of the video as it can, as fast as it can, and start playing once it thinks it has enough.

This means it's possible for your connection to drop out completely for a second, or just vary by the amounts Internet traffic typically does, and so long as it comes back in time, your video will just keep playing.

This applies even to most sane "live" broadcasts.

Trying to do it actually live, within a few milliseconds, is completely different. The slightest blip in connectivity, which a sufficiently buffered stream would skip right over, is going to be catastrophic here.

And just in case it wasn't obvious: Buffers inherently add latency, proportional to their size. Add a buffer that can handle even half a second of connection trouble, and you've just added half a second between the time the player says "turn left", and the time they see the camera turn left.

I mention all of this because I suspect that the reason you'd think this is a good idea is, you've got a Roku, or you've used YouTube, or even Skype, and you've concluded that the Internet is now fast enough to do video. Maybe, but I don't think it's fast enough to do the kind of high quality, live, low-latency video demanded by a gamer.

Re:Caps

[hairyfeet]

Well from reading TFA(I know, I know, but I got bored) they are talking "Wii level" graphics for everyone that don't have the pipe from hell. But even worse than the caps(where I live it is a lousy 36GB per month) I think the congestion would frankly cause this thing to bring a network to its knees. I mean, can you imagine what just a couple of dozen gamers using this thing during primetime would suck down the pipe? And of course once they started dragging everyone to a crawl the traffic shaping would get cranked up and the lag on this thing would be like watching a slideshow. Anybody else remember the bad old days of dialup when you would try to game and get "killed by the invisible man" due to getting some bad lag?

While I can understand why it was so easy to get the game companies onboard, after all we are talking about turning ALL games into rentals, with no first sale doctrine to interfere with profits, this thing just seems like a REALLY bad idea. The days of uncapped Internet are quickly coming to a close due to the fact that our greedy bloodsucking telecos would rather stuff their pockets than actually increase capacity, your ability to game would be taken out of your hands and be dependent on a combination of network traffic+this companies servers, and if you are like many where you get charged crazy money for going over your cap all it would take is your kid having a gaming session with his buds while you are at work to give you the cable/DSL bill from hell.

No thanks, I think I will stay with my nice plastic discs. They are easy to carry, easy to back up, and work no matter whether there is a decent broadband connection or not. I can play games that are old/no longer popular, and with the bargain bin I can game for quite cheap(just picked up MOH 10th anniversary for $20 last week). All this talk about how "expensive PC gaming is" is frankly a load of crap. My PC is going on 5 years old and plays FEAR, Bioshock, pretty much any game I want to play. All it cost was a $105 graphics card upgrade. So IMHO this seems like another vaporware solution for a problem that frankly doesn't exist. They are talking about in TFA about gaming on freaking Netbooks with this thing! Does anyone think that would be a nice experience? Hell those things can get skippy just from having a few programs open! No thanks, my plastic discs are a better value IMHO.

Re:Caps

[flitty]

But MMO's are not the graphics heavy/processing heavy games that this cloud computing idea is focusing on. This is the major flaw in this idea, any RPG or similar style game that usually doesn't require twitch reflexes is usually not graphics heavy (most of the time). The games that really need a high level machine (over $500) are mostly FPS or are based on twitch gameplay, which would seem to be unplayable on this service.

Re:Caps

[Lemmy Caution]

It's true. With cloud computing, everyone will be able to see you scratch your nuts.

Re:Caps

[PIBM]

And I believe your blu-ray was still only 1920x1200... What will you do for those of us playing in 2560x1600, on two or three monitors, you insensitive clod!

Re:Caps

[NoobixCube]

If The Phantom had made it to market (maybe it did, but I know I never saw one outside of a magazine mockup), this is exactly what would have killed it. Such a console just wouldn't survive in a country where ISPs use download caps - or in the case of many ISPs in Australia, "usage caps" or "data allowances" which include uploads.

My predictions

[Benanov]

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?

Re:My predictions

[truthsearch]

It sounds like the device would be a thin client. No local storage and little processing other than graphics, maybe not even local 3D rendering. The device can probably be so cheap that they wouldn't mind the small percentage of loss to hackers. At $50/year they're really charging for the servers and service much more than the client hardware.

Re:My predictions

[Lonewolf666]

I guess the console will be rather low-end (and not have much in the way of mass storage), so it won't be all that attractive as replacement for a "real" computer. OTOH, it is probably cheap to make and has all the connectors required for a thin client in an office environment. So if the manufacturer sells the MicroConsole separately, that might be an interesting "alternative use".

No thanks

[Macthorpe]

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.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that actually thinks this is viable is clearly a moron, the lag would make it totally unplayable.

This is just venture capital BS to fool the stupid non technical investors...

I'm surprised Slashdot are stupid enough to even pick up on it..

Re:No thanks

[0xABADC0DA]

Instead of normal online game lag, you have lag between you actually pressing a button and the game responding at the server.

Not necessarily. A LOT of lcd computer monitors have 'input lag' of say 50ms (meaning the computer sends the image to the monitor but you don't see it for 50ms after that) whereas lcd tvs don't, and few people complain. Presumably if the game servers are co-located with the ISP you could get lag much smaller than that.

Re:No thanks

[Wovel]

Except that is not what it says... It says the server will do the lifting to a thin client. The server is not just streaming binaries to be rendered on the client, the server is receiving input from and return video to be displayed on the client.

I think Amazon sells crowbars to remove your foot from your mouth.

Re:No thanks

[Albio]

So they've transferred the executable to you. Great. Now where is your hardware to execute it?

Re:No thanks

[toad3k]

This doesn't sound as stupid to me. Obviously this wouldn't work well for something like an fps, but for something like an rpg, a casual game, a turn based game, some rts's? It would work fine. Secondly there is hardly any upfront cost. Essentially the hardware on your end would be 40 bucks including the controller. That is an amazingly low barrier to entry, considering you might have access to dozens or hundreds of games right off the bat. There will also never be any issues of backwards compatibility, every game will be playable for as long as the company feels like supporting it. There's no cheating, no red rings of death. The only real barrier right now is bandwidth, but for how long?

I've been predicting this would happen eventually, much to the derision of others, but I didn't expect to see plans for another five years maybe.

Re:No thanks

[nschubach]

There's a huge difference between a FPS and an MMO. There are a large chunk of gamers who didn't use wireless mice for a long time because of the input lag. There are those that still refuse to use some of these laggy LCDs for the same reason. You have to "play" the game before you can see it happen.

I remember being able to run through a Unreal tournament match and hit off head shots of moving targets because I could respond in a split second and had precise control. I was not able to reproduce that when I moved to a LCD monitor. It's not because my reaction time was decreased. Lag is a serious consideration for FPS games. It works well for MMOs because you aren't rocket jumping and popping off head shots while in mid air. Online shooters are a pain as well. I don't know how many times I've shot people to have nothing happen because their client doesn't agree or registered the shot differently.

Re:No thanks

[Candid88]

"I think Amazon sells crowbars to remove your foot from your mouth."

...and I wonder if Amazon sell anything capable of removing your head from your arse.

Re:No thanks

[donaldm]

So really I don't see lag as a real objection to this. I don't see bandwidth as a huge problem going forward either... lots of people already have fiber going to their house these days.

For those people who have ADSL, fibre or even cable can you answer the following:

1. Is your download capability unlimited if not what is your limit?
2. Does your ISP throttle your service after a certain threshold is reached? If so what is your throttle speed?
3. If you have a download cap do you pay for any excess? If so how much?
4. What is your average network speed during peak periods.
5. What is your average network speed during off peak periods?
6. What does your service cost?
7. Do you pay for this service or does someone else?

If you can honestly say your ISP provides a high speed, high bandwidth network connection with totally unrestricted download capability for a low cost that you actually pay for then you are extremely lucky because most of world does not have this and will not even come close to this ideal (this is subjective) for many years to come.

Re:No thanks

[poot_rootbeer]

It says the server will do the lifting to a thin client. The server is not just streaming binaries to be rendered on the client, the server is receiving input from and return video to be displayed on the client.

A game console with all the responsiveness and graphical horsepower of an X11 terminal? How can it fail!!!

This is really bad news for Nintendo.

Re:No thanks

[orkybash]

every game will be playable for as long as the company feels like supporting it.

You say this like it's a good thing.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case, why would you need a server farm to pump out the greatest graphics in the world in order to play a RTS? Most RTS are a few years behind FPS games like Crysis.

Re:No thanks

[aj50]

Unless the game you're playing trusts the client to do its own hit detection (which would preclude any competitive Internet play), it's the server that disagreed over whether you hit the person, not their client. (although it's possible that some artifacts are produced due to lag compensation)

The only game that I'm aware of that doesn't do server side hit detection is bzFlag, where each client checks for hits against itself which would make cheating trivial, even if the source code wasn't already available. (More server side logic is planned for v3.0.)

Further reading:
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/w/index.php?title=Lag_Compensation
http://my.bzflag.org/w/Lag

Re:No thanks

[TrekkieTechie]

There will also never be any issues of backwards compatibility, every game will be playable for as long as the company feels like supporting it.

This is a problem in my book. Once I have purchased a console, it's mine forever, and the games I purchased to go with it are mine forever too. My copy of Super Mario Bros. on the NES won't stop working just because Nintendo has decided they don't want to support the game any more.

Re:No thanks

[marcansoft]

You're a victim of the marketing. There's a difference between "how fast a pixel can flip" and "how long it takes to START flipping after the computer tells it to". 2ms response time means no ghosting. It doesn't mean the LCD processing won't take over 50ms to actually propagate the change to the screen. In fact, very often, these low pixel response times are achieved using driving tricks and heavy preprocessing, which ADD lag by buffering more input frames.

Long ago, the complaint was ghosting and blurriness in high motion environments, but that's long since gone. The problem now are some LCDs which buffer a bunch of frames in order to perform questionable advanced processing, and which adds a ton of lag to the actual picture. Manufacturers don't quote numbers for that, unfortunately.

Image bandwidth

[yakumo.unr]

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.

Re:Image bandwidth

[TubeSteak]

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.

You mean like the Nintendo Wii?

Re:Image bandwidth

[Wovel]

Even the summary says the games are rendered by the servers.... The article will tell you they have a proprietary compression algorithm, which will send compressed video for 480p at 1.5mbps and 1080p at 5mbps, and nothing higher...

I will tell you this all works great inside their offices, and probably not anywhere else on this planet.

No No No!

[godfra]

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?

Re:No No No!

[commodore64_love]

In other words this is RENTAL gaming, not ownership gaming. I prefer to own games, because I tend to play them for years and years (like Final Fantasy 7 or Pirates). Plus owning a game allows me to recover my money later on through the used market.

This ain't South Korea

[javacowboy]

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?

Re:This ain't South Korea

[SanityInAnarchy]

Not really. See my sig.

Why don't large cities have this already? Manhattan has 1.6 million people packed into 22.6 square miles. Can they get that good a deal?

Yes, it has something to do with difference in land mass. However, even in high population density areas, the US lags well behind the rest of the world. Comcast would never survive in Japan.

Massive bandwidth requirements

[Turzyx]

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.

With new "Low-latency HD Video"

[e2d2]

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.

Re:World of Warcraft

[gazbo]

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.

Re:Graphics bottleneck...

[TheRaven64]

Depends on how dumb the front end is. Remote OpenGL is quite usable. OpenGL inherently has a client-server architecture. In the most common use, the server is on the graphics card and the client is on the CPU, but you can put the server on a different machine (and a lot of people do) and still get good performance. I ran GLQuake over a (shared) 10Mb/s network a few years ago and it performed quite well. This would work okay on the kind of asymmetric link you get at home, because you're pulling down lots of data (textures, geometry, and so on) but only sending up simple events (mouse moved, key pressed). If the client is just an X server supporting AIGLX with a decent local GPU, then this is feasible. The 'microconsole' could just be a simple *NIX system running X.org and a simple local app for connecting. X.org already runs on OS X and Windows, and so the same code could be used on all platforms.

Re:What is likely to happen

[Sait-kun]

Then they would be broke within a very short time unless its for a very small group of people even streaming one single game will take a huge amount of bandwidth.

AWS, Azure

[gcnaddict]

Cloud computing as a whole is vaporware

Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure beg to differ.

Three problems: lag, lag and lag

[dazedNconfuzed]

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.

READ TEH ARTICLES MUCH??

[relguj9]

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.

Re:READ TEH ARTICLES MUCH??

[ceoyoyo]

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. Sounds like a winner.

Oh yeah, and it'll blow my bandwidth cap in about forty hours.

Read the article for fuck's sake...

[relguj9]

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.