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OnLive CEO Provides Details On Cloud Gaming
eldavojohn writes "OnLive is a new cloud gaming service that is in beta testing. While it might sound like nothing more than corporate buzzwords creeping over into the gaming world, a new video reveals how the CEO claims his service will work. Perlman explains OnLive's solution to the video game compression problem and talks about the '80 ms latency budget.' It's pretty interesting to listen to him figure out this budget and where the 'costs' come from. (Video only.) Now, this all hinges on the 'microconsole,' which — as he reveals at the beginning of the video — is so cheap they plan to give it away. We may also see it incorporated with TVs and other electronic devices. He goes on to talk about perceptual science and dealing with packet irregularities on the internet."
There will be PC/Mac clients? Browser plugins even? Why didn't you say so, all of a sudden I give a shit.
Word of advice: don't get blinded by the US market. They don't spend nearly as much on games as other parts of the world.. and they don't have the greatest broadband. Other than the fact that you're white, is there a reason why you're not rolling out in Korea first?
How we know is more important than what we know.
The first page doesn't even load for me, and I'm not interested in watching the video in the second link.
Surely we can demand that this type of summary without textual links should not be written, altogether.
Does it run on Linux? I mean I know this question is often used in jest, but I'm serious.
"is so cheap they plan to give it away"
Hey Perlman (if that is your real name): the dot-com bubble called. They want their failed business strategy back. Subsidise the hardware, sure, but don't give it away. That's just asking for financial disaster. Your business is risky enough as it is.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Where I have I heard this before? Oh yeah, from a company that now makes lapboards and keyboards, Phantom is it?
Well looks like they are getting funding from some serious players:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/techchron/archives/180603.asp
http://blog.onlive.com/2009/09/29/onlive-closes-major-investment/
AT&T Media Holdings, Inc., Lauder Partners, Warner Bros., Autodesk and Maverick Capital.
I live in Japan, and it only cost $60-80 USD a month to have a 100MB up & down fiber optic connection in every room of my house. I know Japan is only the size of California, but come on. Seriously, the US spends millions on beach sand and damn near nothing on real connections.
Gaming on Weed might sounds like fun with all them clouds but the reality is you'll wake up in your mid 30s, broke, with no life and wish you hadn't. Besides everyone knows your reaction time is better when you're sober.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
No it doesn't hinge on a microconsole. There are windows and mac clients too.
The big news of the day is AT&T investing in Onlive. http://us.mobile.reuters.com/m/FullArticle/p.rdt/CTECH/ntechnologyNews_uUSTRE58T0PV20090930 With AT&T backing there is no caps and perhaps that is how they are solving the lag as well.
Servers that scale: check. Resources brought online as needed: check. Software as a service: Check.
And that's what make MMORPGs SUCK in my book. I can't play on the train (unless I spend a lot on wireless broadband - it ain't cheap in Aus). I have to rely on servers being up. I don't have time for any of that. If I get an hour to play a game, it needs to be available then and there whenever and whereever I get a chance to play.
If I want online chat I'll socialise with real world friends and family. I even have a couple of backups (mobile phone and land line). If you think I'm a luddite keep in mind I was on Skype and MSN with my mother 2 nights ago (after going round and fixing the security on her wireless network). I know there are people who love these games - even to the point of neglecting "real" life, but I just can't get into a system where my pleasure is at some company's control. I don't want to play a game against a freakishly good 12 year old. I might be interested in a game against a real world friend but I don't want something that saps my time and requires friends interested in the same niche as me.
By all means diversify but can we please keep traditional on a cd/dvd games that don't require a cloud, or even a network?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
That video got pretty 1337 right at the end.
I guess that sooner or later, there will be Linux client. There will be FreeBSD client. There can even be Solaris client! This will come from community of geeks who had enough of playing XBill ;).
What I don't like about this, is that you no longer own a game copy. I buy older games not only because I have Intel integrateg graphics, but also because I can pass it on to my brother or my girlfriend when I'm done with it. No DRM in old games. New ones usually won't run on Linux so I don't care that much, but these are full of shitty DRM.
I think that there is something really wrong about not having a copy of game, it takes out great value from service.
I remember the times when we exchanged cardridges of NEX/SNES with friends when I was 12. That was great feeling. Now you loose it, it's sad.
... rhymes with Cloud Wanking.
The allure of ***Cloud*** (insert fireworks) surprises and doesn't surprise me. Seems like any tech concept you can put in simple allegorical terms that can be understood by the technically illiterate investors (and tech journalists at Wired) is a surefire recipe for success. Here... let me try:
"Mountain(TM) Computing! The Problem: computing resources are spread too thin across the enterprise. Solution: With Mountain(TM) computing we marshal them for access at the peak. Intel and Microsoft are excited about Mountain(TM) computing."
Also see: Push, Web 2.0.
Broadband starved countries (Africa, Oceania) where we get chucked on 64kbps when we go over the limit? Do us a favour and don't bother bringing it over here. I have no desire to re-load the same bandwidth day after day ... what a waste of pipes. I'd rather install game ONCE and incur no bandwidth costs at all.
For those with short attention spans, the product is supposed to provide games by server-side rendering. The essential question is: on aggregate, is it cheaper for them to buy the game-rendering hardware and set up the network infrastructure and add their margin, than for the end user to simply go out and buy a games console outright? If 20% of their users want to play Crysis 2, and 80% want to play Peggle, the company needs to buy enough heavy-duty hardware for all of those people to play Crysis 2, and still offer the service at a price which will please people who want Peggle. I'm not sure that the maths will work.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
You should never ever trust the client. This would be impossible to do, because people would cheat like hell..
In the video, when he talks about spectators all watching one person (same stream), he says they would use "multicast within our datacenters". Well, I could see the point of using multicast up to the end-points through the whole path (which, at least in germany, sadly won't work, because providers here don't support it), but using it within the datacenters? How will that help 100.000 people watching the stream, you will still need to unicast it expensively to every single viewer from the border of the datacenter.
Can someone clear this up for me? Would multicasting work on US-Internet?
I feel like this would totally destroy rhythm based games and fighting games where even 30 or 40 ms lag is noticeable to the average player because of the way the timing works. Aiming in shooting games would probably feel too weird to be very enjoyable.
Imagine some sort of cloud gaming future in like 2050 where vast swaths of game genres have been killed off by the lag inherent to the game systems, and people play nothing but slow paced adventure and puzzle games!
The video is 13:37 long. OnLive must be good.
latency is not the only problem that this will hit.
I see bandwidth as one big one as many people only have 1.5-3 meg download and can't get faster. also cable may not be much better just think about how much load this will put on a node if a block full of people all hit this at the same time.
also the need for a LOT of hardware at EACH data center (Hardware needs like 1 high end pc per user for a lot of the games + back end systems) and the they will need a lot of data centers all over the place to keep lag down.
hot cable israel has a system like this running on there cable boxes and that type of setup may work here but likely some like that will hit the same thing people see with VOD they will run out of slots for this.
So if we all move to simple client apps and micro consoles, no longer upgrading our machines ourselves, then who will be driving high-end graphics innovations? With no market for PC graphics cards or even for cards in new consoles then who pays ATI / Nvidia to continue developing new technology? I suppose the responsibility then falls to game developers? Will they need to push new graphics innovation nearly as hard as the current market where large companies are constantly competing to upstage each other visually?
The difference is that with a mobile phone, they have some gaurentee of income because of the contract. The contract says "You agree to pay us this much a month for X months, or a single lump fee of Y should you cancel the contract." Ok well that means that if you keep your contract, they make money since you pay them for service each month. If you cancel, the fee is sufficient to cover the cost of the phone.
However if this is a situation of "Here's free hardware, you pay for games," that only works if I have any intention of paying for the games. What happens if I take their free hardware, and then don't use their service? They are now out the cost of the hardware.
Because our nations are so similar. Ok so you've got a nice cheap connection. May I ask how much you pay for your living arrangements? Also, how big is the place you live? For reference I pay about $850/month for my place. I don't rent, I own. That amount includes principal and interest on the loan, taxes, and association dues. For that I have a 167 square meter, 3 bedroom, condo. The condo grounds have a pool and jacuzzi for the use of the residents, as well as some nice grassy areas to sit and read and so on. How's that stack up to your housing?
I'm not trying to brag, I am trying to say that we don't live in similar nations. Japan has some advantages the US doesn't, but those come at a cost just as the advantages the US has come at a cost. Where I live, things are a bit spread out. There's 50 miles of nothing in all directions one you leave the city, and the city itself is very spread out, rarely are things more than a couple stories high.
Also, how's the upstream on that connection? I don't mean upload speed, I mean speed of the links higher up. You get 100mbps signaling rate, that's great. Can you get that kind of speed to other places in Japan off your ISP? How about to places in the US or Europe?
I ask because in my experience, these massive links that many foreign countries have seem to be more or less big WANs. By that I mean they have high bandwidth links to the users, but no upstream backing it up. So you get blazing transfers to other customers, good transfers to anyone peered with the ISP, average to lousy transfers to anywhere else.
Now maybe that's ok with you, however that's real different from my connection. It is only 10mbit, but I get that to anywhere that can handle it. They have sufficient upstream at all levels to sustain that kind of speed. I am just not so impressed when people talk about their fast connections, but it is only fast to a select group of people.
I mean I could claim I have a gigabit connection at work. The signaling speed to my computer is gig, and I get those kinds of speeds to some things. However the switch it is on only has a gig uplink, and the switch that connects to only has a gig uplink and so on and the campus itself (I work for a university) only has about a gig of total Internet bandwidth. So I can get gig transfers to our file server, and I can get near gig transfers to someone in another building, but I'm only getting 50-100mbit or so (depending on how loaded the network is) out to the Internet at large. As such saying it is a "gigabit" Internet connection would be misleading. Technically maybe, but not in real operation.
Dammit. Parent tricked me into watching the entire video only to learn no new information. The 1337 he speaks of is the video's runtime: 13m:37s.
It's not just the network bandwith: the 80ms they talk about is probably the ideal case for the time since the user sends input until the server sens the resulting frame and the frame decodes and shows on the user's screen. In real conditions not only I suspect the number is higher, but it will add up to the latency already existing in the game itself -- sometimes as high as 200ms (for GTA) as talked about in article posted on Slashdot recently. Add those ideal 80ms to it (+ whatever is real) and you'll get such a lag that I'm guessing the your mind will have enough time to ask, wait a minute what am I doing here?
Isn't this the Phantom from infinium labs that was eventually considered vaporware? Sounds like same dream.
It would be cool, if on the road, I could launch one of my games whereever I'm at (say a friends) and play my games. But instead of a service, I want to run the server myself.
There's streammygame.com for the pc (haven't tried it yet) but again it's a service and not standalone.
I really liked all his arguments, exactly the same as WebTV, also exactly the same as why keep mainframes and centralized computing.
Come on, didn't 30 years of history teach you anything at all?
A piece of "cloud?" I mean if this thing goes belly up, then what do you have? Years later (so long as the console still functions) you can play your Atari 2600 games, your Odyssey games, etc. Some may laugh at you but hey you own it, and can play until your gaming heart is content. I think this will be the "Betamax" or "HD-DVD" of the gaming world.