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New Service Aims To Replace Consoles With Cloud Gaming

Posted by Soulskill on from the who-needs-new-hardware-anyway dept.

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."

5 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. Caps by Spad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Caps by poetmatt · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. No thanks by Macthorpe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:No thanks by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

  3. No No No! by godfra · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?