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OnLive Gaming Service Gets Lukewarm Approval
Vigile writes "When the OnLive cloud-based gaming service was first announced back in March of 2009, it was met with equal parts excitement and controversy. While the idea of playing games on just about any kind of hardware thanks to remote rendering and streaming video was interesting, the larger issue remained of how OnLive planned to solve the latency problem. With the closed beta currently underway, PC Perspective put the OnLive gaming service to the test by comparing the user experiences of the OnLive-based games to the experiences with the same locally installed titles. The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not."
Read: "excitement (from clueless arts majors masquerading as tech journalists) and hilarity (from anyone with even a remote shred of knowledge of the technologies involved)".
Look, this tech may - may - be workable for SimWarConquer, but for anything that's reaction based? No. Not going to happen. There is no technobabble solution to latency, and anyone who tells you otherwise wants your credit card number.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
1. All game publishers will be paid for every hour of game played. This increases their income,
This will decrease their income. One of the great things about gaming is the entertainment hours/dollar value. I can spend $50 on a game, and get hundreds of hours of entertainment out of it. Unless we're looking at less than $.25/hr it's simply not price competitive with local gaming.
2. Instead of there being 3 console platforms + PC, there will be just one platform : the PCs in the cloud gaming data centers.
And what incentive do the console makers have to just go away?
3. The overall costs of gaming will be lower.
Gaming is cheap as shit anyway. And when has renting ever been cheaper than owning?
I'll stop here. It's not going to happen. There's always going to be a market for local games.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Because guess what? In the real world, people live all over. Onlive isn't going to be able to say "Just move closer to one of our data centers," at least not if they want to pitch themselves as the "cheaper than buying a graphics card" option. Sounds to me like they've been controlling who gets in to the beta to try and create an overly rosy impression. This guy was a more realistic test, a person who doesn't happen to be near their few locations.
That's just the reality of this. If it is to work well I can't only work well for a few people in a few locations.
Imagine a movie-listings website for the greater New York City area. Now imagine some from Wyoming complaining that the theater in Cheyenne isn't listed on that site. The response that person would get is the same that your objection gets:
If you don't live with our covered-area, feel free to use another service. We have plenty of customers within our area and we have decided not to cover yours.
Not every business on the planet expects to serve every customer one the planet, and yet somehow they can still turn profits.
Makes it not so attractive as they hyped it to be, especially against powerful $100 graphics cards (the low-mid range of graphics is great these days) and $200 game consoles.
I think one of us has missed something. Either you're right, and OnLive expects this to kill all other gaming everywhere, or I'm right in that this is a supplemental service to gaming that adds a remote component for those customers that want it and can access it.
Trust? In what way, beyond what you would give *any* online merchant to whom you provide your credit card info?
It's like with honest politician: I trust them to stay bought....
Something i value with my games is to take an old savegame and try something new. If i don't "own" the game but just purchased a service, the game or the savegame may disappear.
If e.g. Amazon takes my money and won't deliver my copy of Mass Effect 2, i have a good chance to get my money back. But if i purchase OnLive to play Mass Effect 2 and they remove the game from their list, my "invested" time and some of my money is gone. If this happens 1-2 years after the purchase, there is nothing i can do that will have any effect.
Someone taking my credit card credentials and using them fraudulently is a known process i know how to handle.
CU, Martin