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OnLive Gaming Service Gets Lukewarm Approval

Posted by Soulskill on from the better-than-lukewarm-rejection-i-guess dept.

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."

33 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Yet another infomation-free summary... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The guy logged in using credentials 'borrowed' from an authorised beta tester, from more than twice the recommended distance from the server, acknowledged multiple high latency (due to distance) notifications, and the best he could do is damn the service with faint praise.

    1. Re:Yet another infomation-free summary... by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Interesting

      But for serious gamers it is common knowledge that remote playing will not ever be as quick as a LAN frag fest.

      Possibly true, but possibly also might not matter, if it's still quick enough. After all, playing on the internet isn't as quick as a "LAN frag fest", and yet the vast majority of gamers, even of twitch-heavy games, are playing on the internet, not on LANs.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    2. Re:Yet another infomation-free summary... by slim · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Even when it's a full product, you won't be allowed to sign up if you're not in a geographically suitable place.

      It seems that the eventual plan is that it will dynamically assign your session to the closest datacentre. But for the timebeing, each Beta tester's ID is assigned a datacentre at registration time, and that's the one that ID will use every time.

      It explains in the TFA that he borrowed the login credentials from a beta tester in another part of the country. Hence he wasn't using a nearby server, as he would have been if he was a real beta tester, or in future, a paying customer.

      It's pretty amazing it worked as well as it did, considering all that.

    3. Re:Yet another infomation-free summary... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      ". After all, playing on the internet isn't as quick as a "LAN frag fest", and yet the vast majority of gamers, even of twitch-heavy games, are playing on the internet, not on LANs."

      With tons of client side prediction and faking trying very very hard to hide the client-server lag.

      With OnLive, you can't do that - it just sends some inputs and gets some video back.

      I mean, this could work under optimal, super fast network connections, but I'm pretty sure ensuring you have such a connection would be so expensive that this is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist - it is always cheaper to spend the money on client side hardware instead. I'm sure stupid venture capitalists will keep pumping money into this with idiotic projections how bazillion people will pay X dollars per month or hour or whatever that will somehow cover those network infrastructure costs.

      I doubt it will and few years from now OnLive goes bust taking a big pile of money with it, but hey, you never know... can't do impossible stuff without trying.

    4. Re:Yet another infomation-free summary... by Rockoon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      We used to play twitch games all the time back when 56K modems (and thus, latency considerably higher than 80ms) were state of the art. Counter-Strike was born on 56K modems, for example.

      The game has to be specifically written to deal with it, but it can be done.

      Just the same, I think that this service will be a monumental failure. I just dont see how they will recover the costs, because they can't make it too expensive or the end user can save money by buying a machine that doesnt require their service. Those that already have such a machine (mostly everybody) wont even consider paying the extra costs.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
  2. Videos removed from YouTube already by l_bratch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The menu video seems to be available, but the in game videos now give:

    "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by OnLive, Inc..."

  3. I just gotta saaaaaayy the waaaaayyy I feeeeeeel. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What is it with all this 'cloud' stuff?

    I've got half a terabyte of storage, a pretty good graphics card with shader support and a nippy CPU.

    When there are raytracing cards with inbuilt physics, I'll enjoy a slightly more realistic gaming experience on my local machine, thanks.

    Until then, I'll have to go with pretty realistic and the only significant cause of latency being my old neurons.

    GOML.

  4. Correction: for "excitement and controversy" by Rogerborg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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. Re:Correction: for "excitement and controversy" by slim · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And yet this review - from a sceptic - says it pretty much works. While it's in beta. From a location that would have been excluded from the beta if he'd gone through proper channels.

    2. Re:Correction: for "excitement and controversy" by Rogerborg · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Mmm. Two out of three games were reported as playable, with noticeable latency compared to a local version, one being "right on the edge" of playability. The best experience came from a game that's largely about learning the track, which makes it not a reaction game per se.

      Notice that this was while playing over a wired-to-the-wall connected (who still uses those?) and with a low 85ms ping to the server.

      I'm also assuming that there was a certain degree of tolerance for a novel experience. Once people are actually paying for a metered service, how much latency and input wackiness are they going to be willing to tolerate? I'm thinking a lot less than for a free or flat rate subscription service.

      It'll work tolerably well for some games, some of the time, barring server or transport snafus, ISPs "shaping" the traffic (coming to an ISP near you in 3... 2... 1...) or the service dying under the weight of its own success. Whether that'll be enough to support their business model is dubious at best, since the instant the quality drops, so does their revenue.

      --
      If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
  5. I am indeed dissapoint, Slashdot. by EdZ · · Score: 2, Funny

    I came here expecting to see a belated "First!" post followed by a joke about lag.

  6. concern about patches... hmpf by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Gamers would also no longer have to worry about patches and software updates to their gaming titles - one of those annoyances that PC gamers often cite on their way to moving to a console.

    I recently bought a PS3 with some games. When I started it I was welcomed with "You need to install the latest PS3 firmware now!". So I had to wait for it to install and reboot. Then I inserted a game and wanted to play, but I was welcomed with "Updates have been found for this game and need to be installed". Which is pretty much identical to the PC, but there you often have the option to install the patch.

  7. Re:I just gotta saaaaaayy the waaaaayyy I feeeeeee by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you can't keep up with the upgrade cycle required to play the latest PC games, buy a console or play older games.

    The problem with playing older games is that either the matchmaking servers end up switched off (e.g. DNAS Error -103 on PS2 games), or if not, the established players tend not to be friendly toward newbies (e.g. "gtfo n00b" on several classic first-person shooters).

  8. Re:As expected by mseeger · · Score: 2, Informative

    Latency (for a not overbooked line) depends on bandwitdh and packet size. Same packetsize and ten times the bandwidth reduces the latency nearly by a factor of ten (on a single line).

    Overall latency depends on the sum of all latencies for each lines on the way plus a bonus for each router. The bonus for the routers is not the issue. The number of hops can be influenced by a service provider like OnLive through Peering Agreements. Something OnLive cannot influence, is the last mile to the customer. Usually 30-50% of the total latency happens here. So an increase in bandwidth will help there.

    In my case if have a latency of about 25-30ms to the major hosting providers here in germany (which is due to a fast line [6mbps + Fastpath]). The time can be distributed as follows:

    - 2ms (my home network)
    - 12ms my DSL line
    - 2ms my Provider
    - 10ms Upstrean Provider
    - 1ms Hosting Provider

    Even in my case nearly 50% of the latency is created on the last mile. The packet travels Kiel -> Hamburg -> Hannover -> Duesseldorf -> Frankfurt. That amounts to perhaps 400 miles. 50% of the latency on 1% of the way seems to me as a pretty conclusive argument that more bandwidth to the enduser would overall latency significantly.

    CU, Martin

    P.S. This all depends on the Bandwidth not being overbooked.....

  9. First Post! by mister_playboy · · Score: 3, Funny

    There was even more latency than you expected, you insensitive clod!

    --
    Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will
  10. I just don't see this working by jbb999 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The major problem isn't overall latency, it's little spikes of latency on an otherwise good line. A moment of 100ms lag on an otherwise good line doesn't matter for online games because of client prediction and at worst it's a tiny moment where the controls don't seem responsive. It's not a problem for normal video because they can buffer 250ms or 500ms or 1000ms of video without any problem. But on this they can't do any significant buffering or the latency will be too much to play.And even 100ms of sudden latency will cause the picture to lag or freeze or jump. It might only happen occasionally but I suspect people won't put up with it. And they can't do anything about it either, even if your ISP is only 10% loaded on its lines and routers, there will be times when all that 10% send packets at the same moment and they get queued in a router somewhere, just for a tiny time but tiny little amounts of jitter like this are normal and expected and to be honest I think will be the downfall of this project because there is no real way to deal with them. But I guess we'll see :)

  11. Re:Where what people are? by slim · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Less than 200 miles from Chicago. You'll be fine.

    In fact you're already on their coverage maps. I'd be astonished if they didn't expand from the three datacentres used for the Beta.

  12. 1 MB/sec... by V50 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are still large areas of North America stuck with either stone-age Dial-Up (in 20-freakin'-10) or slow expensive satellite. Like mine (I cry myself to sleep over my 1200ms latency) This is absolutely a no-go there. Obviously.

    Now, in better places, I'm sort of out of the loop. Whenever I've spent time in cities, either visiting my brother in Ottawa or living in London (Ontario, not the good one) for a few months at a time, it's been my experience that even connections that are supposed to get up to 1MB/sec would be lucky to get that in practice, especially at peak times. Furthermore, the sheer amount of lagspikes, connection hiccups, or general time when the interrnet craps out for no apparent reason makes it seem like you'd be dealing with one frustration after another. The number of times I see people get DC'd on World of Warcraft seems to back up my theory that staying connected, and maintaining a constant connection at 5KB/s or so (for WoW) is difficult enough, doing the same for a (whopping?) 1/MB/s while keeping latency under 100ms would be hellish.

    So is my experience with the Internet indicative of the general population, or have I just had the misfortune of having terrible service? Can people really keep 1MB/s sustained, without lag hiccups, DCs, lost packets, etc, while keeping under 100ms?

    1. Re:1 MB/sec... by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well yes, some people can. However in general you need to live in an area with good access anyhow. Also, you are going to need to have a good deal better than what you want minimum. If you want to sustain 1mbps without a problem, you probalby need a 10mbps line. The more headroom you've got, the easier it is to maintain what you need.

      That is not to say it is problem free, even good connections will drop sometimes or have problems. Also, of course, better connections tend to cost more money. Not a huge deal, but it does create something of a problem when you are marketing to the cheap crowd. The people who won't spend $100 on a graphic card or $200 on a console may also be the people who buy the bargain cable package which is usually pretty slow.

      So sure, it can be done. My connection is 12/1.5 mbps and I almost always get my full speed since it is business class (and have never gotten less than about 80%). Thus even if I drop a packet now and again, I need to sustain less than 10% speed to maintain the requisite 1mbps. More, my connection is pretty low latency. I see 40-50ms to many sites that are in nearby states and on providers peered with my provider.

      However, as you probalby guessed, this is not the cheap connection. I pay a good bit for quality Internet and I'm happy to do so. However, I'm also happy to buy a good GPU and have games run well on my system. I've no interest in their service, though I've got the kind of connection you'd want for it.

  13. Until they overcome that little "physics" thing... by mykos · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is an obvious pump and dump scheme, unless they have somehow unlocked technology previously unseen and unknown by mankind, and have done so for the purpose of playing video games.

  14. Re:Duuuuuh by Svartalf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually...it's doable technically with only a very, very small number of subscribers.

    Latency and bandwidth will kill the whole thing.

    You have to use peak values per customer in your figuring for it to even remotely work the way they portrayed this.

    Given this:

    1.5Mbits/s for the feed per user for SD experience with OnLive.

    You can serve roughly as an absolute maximum :

    30 users on a T3.
    103 users on an OC-3.
    404 users on an OC-12.
    1658 users on an OC-48.

    You can expect about $250-500k/mo recurring costs on that OC-48. As another observation, you will likely need to serve 2/3rds to 3/4ths of those numbers to keep the latency usable because as you fill the pipe to capacity, traffic will be subject to the congestion algorithms in the routers and machines at both ends of the pipe. Now, some will state that they'll place the stuff at the ISP's end of things... Then the ISP gets the joy of this same level of connectivity- and they're bitching about "freeloaders" and "bandwidth problems" right now.

    OnLive is snake oil trying to be sold to the game industry as a solution to their "control" problem. It's an alternate DRM play. And it can NEVER work in our lifetime. You can't field enough bandwidth cheaply enough to accomplish it.

    --
    I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
  15. Re:As expected by mseeger · · Score: 3, Informative
    Hi,

    If say the speed-limit on a motorway was 70mph, and there was no congestion on the road; why would adding in extra lanes to the motorway increase how fast I get to my destination?

    You get the car analogy wrong. A packet of 100 bytes is not similar to a single car. It consists of 800 cars (bits). So if you increase the number of lanes more cars can travel. Each car travels still the same speed (of light) but by allowing more cars at the same time, the delivery (packet) distributed over 800 cars gets delivered faster.

    The time a packet takes to get transmitted is roughly: packetsize/bandbidth.

    Say you have a 10mbps line and a 1000bytes packet. This will take 8000 bit / 10.000.0000 bit / s = 0,00008 s or 0,8ms (one way). So the latency through the line will be roughly 1,6ms. If you got to 100mbps ethenet or even gigabit ethernet, the time will go down by factor 10 each step.

    But there are some side effects: Sometimes packets are packed into larger packets to fill the line better. This will increase the latency. When the speed of the line is high, the time the OS needs to send/receive the packets gets more influence on the latency. Also the latency may occur in your providers network because he overbvooks the service (selling access for more cars than the lanes allow and therfor creating congestion).

    To see wether your line is the chokepoint use Traceroute to see where the latency happens. If the latency already occurs close to you, a faster line may improve the latency. Also look for features from your provider as "fastpath".

    CU, Martin

    P.S. This is a very short overview of the topic. A complete coverage would come as a book. BTW the books have already been written: Richard W. Stevens: TCP/IP Illustrated.

  16. Sounds like a realistic test to me by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    Also the more revealing part was just how bad things look, just how much the compression degrades the image quality. The difference between the local and remote screenshots is almost the difference between SD and HD. While the Onlive stuff is 720p, technically, a ton of the detail is getting lost. That's just what you are going to get when you try and jam HD video in to a 1mbps stream. Only problem is that detracts from one of the supposed reasons to get the service. The lower the resolution and image quality, the lower end graphics card that could handle it on a local system. So Onlive isn't giving you the same experience as a $400-$600 graphics card, it is giving you maybe the same experience as a $50-100 graphics card. Well then, makes it much less worth while.

    So initial results seem to show that the doubters were right:

    1) Latency will be an issue. If you don't happen to live near their datacenters, your latency may make playing difficult to impossible.

    2) Quality will suffer. They don't have some magic voodoo compression that makes everything look perfect, their compression is like everyone else's and trying to do 720p @ 60fps equals a good deal of detail loss.

    3) Even if you have a good net connection, if there are problems or congestion, the service will be unusable, meaning you can't play your games whenever you want.

    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.

    1. Re:Sounds like a realistic test to me by BobMcD · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  17. Re:Duuuuuh by IBBoard · · Score: 2, Funny

    [OnLive] can NEVER work in our lifetime.

    You say that, but I've been using a "remote generation of gaming images" system for years and there is basically no lag. Okay, the catalogue of games is a little limited, but the control and response is amazing. Distance? I'd say about three or four feet from the input and output devices to the box that generates my images. Definitely remote from the devices and definitely working over wires without latency issues.

    So, it is already working, and I can't see why I'd want to change to this new one.

  18. Re:As expected by mseeger · · Score: 2, Informative

    Quibbler :-) You wanted it....

    For our example 0.5C is sufficently close to C to call it "speed of light" :-). As you point out, the "speed of light" is not the same as C. I can find materials where the speed of light is below 0.5C. So saying that the electric signal travels at the speed of light is correct since i didn't mention any matrial i would be measuring the speed of light in....

    Point, game and match :-)

    CU, Martin

    P.S. I have references to materials reducing the speed of light to 17m/s (38mph for you imperial bastards) without significant absorption. So even our cars goes at the speed of light ....

  19. Re:As expected by mseeger · · Score: 2, Informative

    Satellite is a very special case. You cannot (as i did) speak of "the last mile" here.... It's more "the last 20.000+ miles" ;-). Even then the formula still holds up if you use sufficently large packets :-). The formula is valid if the packet size is larger than the storage capacity of the line (a 10mbps satellite link has a storage capacity of ~200KB, which is no reasonable packet size).

    Without making a lecture, the last mile is usually one of the Latency Hogs for a lot of the users. By increasing the bandwidth you can reduce the latency. Other parameters include your continent (not easily changed), the quality of your provider (carefully obfuscated by marketing), the technology used (black box for most users), the peerings of your provider (traceroute is your friend), etc.

    BTW: Most users think of bandwidth only in one direction. But espescially if you do serious gaming, the uplink may be responsible for a lot of your latency. Moving the crosshair and pressing a button in a shooter may result in a 400 byte package. If you have a 128kbps uplink, this gives you already 25ms latency on the way out. Usually incoming and outgoing bandwidth are tied together in package by your provider. So increasing the bandwidth, may really help gamers.

    CU, Martin

  20. Re:Well by Hatta · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!
  21. Re:As expected by BobMcD · · Score: 2, Funny

    P.S. I have references to materials reducing the speed of light to 17m/s (38mph for you imperial bastards) without significant absorption.

    Why am I suddenly wearing a black helmet and breathing through a respirator?

  22. Re:As expected by mseeger · · Score: 2, Funny

    Why am I suddenly wearing a black helmet and breathing through a respirator?

    If you're calculating in inches, pounds, gallons or miles: that's worse. I can forgive any honest villain, but not non-metric....

  23. Re:As expected by mseeger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  24. Re:Duuuuuh by dunezone · · Score: 2, Funny

    So as the Mythbusters would say, plausible but not practical?

  25. Doubters should watch the Columbia presentation by Purity+Of+Essence · · Score: 2, Informative

    Doubters should really watch the Columbia University presentation. It's entertaining and very technical and will probably address your every concern. Too many genuine experts here don't know what they are talking about because they are ignorant of the way OnLive actually works. It's more clever than you probably think.

    YouTube Mirror
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FtJzct8UK0

    Original
    http://tv.seas.columbia.edu/videos/545/60/79

    --
    +0 Meh