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OnLive Remote Gaming Service Launches In June
adeelarshad82 writes "After eight years of development, remote gaming service OnLive is scheduled to roll out on June 17 for Windows and Mac. The company also announced its service pricing: users will need to pay $14.95 per month, which will allow them access to the service. However, the company did not disclose the price to rent or purchase games. 'It is partnering in this launch with publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The games will also include new releases like Mass Effect 2, Borderlands, Assassin’s Creed II, as well as a bunch of other titles. Perlman anticipates anywhere from a dozen to 25 titles to be available at launch time, and more after that, depending on how negotiations with other publishers proceed.'"
Zero control over my purchases? Zero re-sale value when I'm tired of a game? Zero incentive for publishers to discount their titles? Zero bandwidth & gaming ability remaining once I hit my cap? Zero ability to take my games with me once the company goes belly-up (and boy, will it ever...)? All for the low, low price of $15/mo? Sign me up!
So I'm paying $15 a month so that I don't need to have a fancy computer to play all the latest games. Except I'm still paying for the games.
So, say a $1000 computer will last me about four years. I'd save about $280 using this service, but I'd have to get all my games through them, I'd only be able to play when my Internet works (wait, are they Ubisoft in disguise?), and the quality of my experience isn't guaranteed to be as good as playing on a copy running off my own machine.
You know what? I'll *pay* that $280, and gladly.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
The business model is flawed from square-one. This is going to sink into bankruptcy very, very quickly. The overhead is pretty significant and profit is required rapidly to keep it afloat. The problem is that there is very little incentive for anyone to sign up. They are competing with consoles AND pc games, yet they only offer pc games. People that are inclined to play PC games already have hardware that can handle it. Those who are not inclined, are on consoles. If their hardware isn't state-of-the-art, they play older games and save for newer hardware. $14.95 a month is so steep, it is only really the type of subscription fee that could be paid by someone who has enough money to buy a computer serious enough to play contemporary games.
This will join cue-cat, divx, and broadcast.com in the tomb of ideas that suckered investors yet were non-movers in the marketplace.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I can't wait for this newest bubble to burst. Thin clients haven't really been embraced for office apps where 95% of the functionality can run in the browser and it will work reasonably well. How can you expect to compete with native apps on PCs where performance is cheaply had so long as you don't need to run at the highest settings...or on consoles which look almost as good? The problem for game companies is that many folks have realized that they can play year old games on cheap new hardware to great effect...after the game is reduced to 50%.
I don't see the market niche. Hardcore gamers won't touch it. Casual gamers will baulk at the $15/month by in BEFORE you get the privilege to buy/rent a game. So, who will want this unless the games are steeply discounted? $180/year could be well spent on local hardware upgrades.
I'm probably missing something here, but why would I want to pay $15 for the privledge of buying software from OnLive?
At least not in the same way your computer is. All video on your computer is sent losslessly, 4:4:4 to your monitor. Full colour resolution per pixel, no blocking of any kind, etc. Gives a very sharp image. This? Not so much. You aren't going to get great quality 720p video, even with the highest end codecs like H.264. It'll be ok, but plenty of artifacts (and that's at 30fps not 60). However they can't do H.264, even if they had infinite compression power, it takes a heavy hitter of a system to decompress, or a videocard that can help the process. So they did their own thing. Well guess what? You can have detail, low bandwidth, or low CPU usage but not all 3.
Looking at screenshots taken from the service, you do lose a good deal of detail. The textures get smeared, the colours are less distinct, etc. All the typical stuff anyone who's played with video compression is familiar with.
So you aren't getting the same experience as you would with a card on the system doing 1280x720, unless you maybe turned the detail down a good bit. There's no solution except to use more bandwidth, or more CPU power decoding (and even that has limits, more bandwidth is the only truly scalable solution). For 720p in Blu-Ray quality you are looking at probably 7mbps minimum, maybe more.
Sorry but I do understand how it works, because I understand networking and video compression both very well. That's all it does. Input from the player's PC is sent to the OnLive servers, the game does with it what it will, the resulting image stream is then compressed and sent to the client PC.
As for ping time and bandwidth mattering if you don't understand, it means you don't understand networking. So, a ping is more or less a small (or zero) payload packet that you send to a server and get a response. Very low overhead. It represents minimum round-trip transit time. Meaning if you have a ping of, say 100ms, your computer will start receiving data from the server not less than 100ms from making the request. Ok, all well and good. However real data isn't 0 bytes. There is an actual data stream to transfer before you can use it. You have to get all the data. How fast that happens depends on the speed of your connection. so suppose your payload is 100kbits. On a 56k modem, it would take about 1800ms to transfer which with a 100ms ping would mean 1900ms from the time a request was sent. On a 1mbps connection, it would take only 100ms to transfer, total of 200ms. On a 100mbps connection it would take 1ms to transfer, 101ms total.
As such both ping AND transfer rate play in to what kind of lag you get with actual data.
That is one of the reasons why they are saying you need a bigger connection than the actual data stream, other wise the transfer of the video would add too much lag.
Sorry if you want this thing to be great, but there are real issues of the Internet and so on that they are contending with, things that PR speak can't make go away. You can't magically tell someone's connection to have less lag.