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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.
Did you read the article? The difference is steam allows you to download games to your own computer, whereas this service allows you to play a game remotely off of their computer. The benefit is you dont need a kickass top of the line computer (just a fast internet connection) to have your performance match that of other players. So you are paying them to get computer upgrades, instead of doing it yourself. Is it worth it? thats a different issue. But the model is very different from Steam
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
I just don't see this succeeding, especially after seeing the leaked preview article. The problem is that on top of the cost of the service, you have to have a good net connection. While it uses like 1mbps for the stream, you need more like a 10mbps connection to keep the latency low. Remember that you don't just have to take ping time in to account with data transfer, but the time it takes to transfer all the data. Ok well good connections cost more money and thus aren't so much the domain of the budget user which is their target user. I mean I've got a connection with low ping times and plenty of bandwidth, however I won't be buying since I also have a video card.
Another problem is that because of the compression on the video stream, you are not going to get the highest quality video, no matter what the settings on the host computer are. Part of their selling point is that you get the max quality of new video cards on your current system. No, not really. Looking at the gameplay vids you get more like mid to lowish quality video. Fine, but that isn't nearly so expensive. $100 will get you a video card that will look as good or better than what was shown, and that is not nearly such a barrier for entry.
Yet another problem is that their service requires you to be near one of their data centers, so that pings are low. Fair enough, latency can kill this, but that means their potential user base is less than it would be otherwise. There will be users who want the service and can't have it because their ping is too high. Some may even be near a data center physically, but too far Internet wise.
Finally there's the ever present lag issue. While the test showed some kinds of games to be playable, the lag is there and was noticeable in relation to a native system.
I just don't see this as having a big enough market. If they truly could deliver a gaming experience the same as owning a $1500-2000 system over low bandwidth net connections, sure. However they can't. They can (almost) deliver the experience of owning a $500 system with a $100 graphics card added on over a moderate bandwidth net connection to some areas.
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.
Has anyone heard how much this will eat into broadband cap?
and what internet speed is needed to play?
Their is one thing I know, I would not want to be stuck with a game that I cannot play till the start of a new month because I decided to watch a few youtube videos.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
Any idea what kind of software they are using to relay the "real time" video from their servers to your computer? I'd love to be able to have my weak laptop connect up to my powerhouse gaming machine for same gaming on the couch, but programs like VNC are waaaay too slow to do this.
If these companies are achieving moderate detail over the internet, how can I accomplish this on my LAN?
Dude, are you seriously...? Your description of lag is utterly idiotic. You obviously don't have a clue what you're talking about. With onlive you're basically streaming *video* and uploading your controller or keyboard inputs. Have you never watched a video before? Have you ever netflixed before? As for sending inputs it's the same as playing any game online.
It's not as simple as just 'streaming video'. Video is already complete and is just waiting to be sent. This is a game which needs to react and respond to your input. Your data needs to be sent to their server, which needs to process it, generate the game's response and send that back to you. Since turning your character makes the entire POV of the game move you've got to redraw everything at a full screen resolution high enough to make it a quality gaming experience. It's simply gonna suck.
Taking into consideration the amount of CPU & GPU cycles the games listed in the article take, there will definitely be lag and stuttering and crappy frame rates and all the other stuff you get when your desktop computer doesn't have enough horsepower to play your game of choice.
Better update your resume because OnLive will be DOA before you know it. I sure hope they aren't trying to get people to buy annual subscriptions.