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Cloud Gaming Service OnLive Set For Launch
Steve Perlman's long-anticipated cloud gaming service, OnLive, officially launches today, finally ready to be put to the test by skeptical and hopeful gamers around the US. After granting some early sign-ups a free year to try out the service, OnLive also announced the list of 23 games that will available from the start, including Mass Effect 2, UT 3, Assassin's Creed 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and F.E.A.R. 2. Perlman spoke at length with Gamasutra about the beta, latency, and potential partnerships with other broadband providers. Future OnLive competitor Gaikai recently announced it's targeting 2011 for its own launch.
From their beta signup page:
The OnLive Game Service (the "Service") Fee will be waived for the first 12 months from the date you activate your OnLive Account. During these 12 months, your access to the Service will include free demos and community features, such as member Profiles, Friending, Chat, Spectating and Brag Clip(TM) videos, but will not include any games, content or other services that are offered for purchase, and which must be purchased separately.
Sounds like you're going to need to pay to test their stuff. At least they're up front about it?
How are they planning to magically teleport 1280x1024 3D video data at 60 FPS to my computer with under 50 ms of additional lag? This is an extremely stupid idea but if you consider that "real" gamers have systems that can render the games by themselves, it's redundant to say that real gamers won't take a technology like this seriously.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Whether for gaming or word processing, nobody ever owns anything. You can be charged on a continuous basis to use services.
(That was sarcasm in case you didn't catch it).
The ownership age is over. It is all about software as a service from here forward. Enjoy it bitches, because just like many modern games never come to the PC, in the future modern games won't be available except in the cloud via subscription. From the publisher's perspective it solves all the problems. They maintain control forever if you don't have any of the content.
Game publishers are going to be all over this technology if they can make it work because it means the game source code never has to be released and, implemented correctly, the games will be impossible to crack.
I'm not too happy about it, but it's the future. If not now, probably this decade or early next.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
Are you getting tired yet about people asking you about lag and OnLive? [laughs]
SP: I am. So, the other thing is we're going to be putting out facts. There's a lot of misconceptions about latency. It's a brand new technology, and it's fair for people to ask. We're going to need to understand this, right.
For example, we've measured monitors that have 80 milliseconds of latency. The monitor. [laughs] In fact, we spoke to that monitor manufacturer, who will remain nameless [laughs], and they understood what we were doing. They got excited about it, and they came out with a new line of monitors that have 9 milliseconds of latency. They're some of the best monitors out there now, okay.
So, people just don't think about it. But you know, if you have an 80 millisecond monitor, anything you're playing on it, a local game, you're going to see some lag in a local game. But people don't think about it because they figure, "Okay, it's local, so lag is not on my agenda to thing about."
Some of the mice you can get that are 15 milliseconds of latency, or you can get mice with 1 millisecond of latency, you know what I mean. It's a huge swing. So, what we're going to do is put the facts. We're going to say, "Look. Here are the kind of things that introduce latency. Please let us know. If you're going to be on a lagging experience, come tell us. Tell us what your system is so we can go and try to test that equipment."
Then what we're going to try to do is put up a list of different equipment and how we've measured it. Not every laptop, but most laptops have pretty low latency screens. So, you know, again, not every trackpad, but trackpads are probably not the best thing to use for gaming. But nonetheless, at least it's built in, and there's a good chance the latency is not too bad on it, right. So, give that a go before you kind of condemn the whole system. [laughs]
These are things that we need to educate people on. The bottom line is this: if you have a good connection to OnLive and your gear is low latency, you have a low latency experience. It works. It really does. It's never going to be low latency as having the exact same computer capability locally, right. I think that's an obvious thing, right. There's a load of latency introduced by the internet.
But the thing that we need to get across to people is that the latency is not exactly what you expected. Sometimes the latency is actually not the internet. Most of the latency is in the last mile. Actually, most of the latency, if you don't have optimal equipment, is in your gear, your monitor, and your mouse. And then the next place you look is in the last mile. And actually, the third place you look is in the internet.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What people don't realize are the monthly fees of $14.95 per month, PLUS you have to pay for the games.
So you pay $180 a year to have videos streamed to your PC. For $100 you can pick up a relatively modest graphics card, pop it in your PC, and have much better picture quality. The compression must be horrible. Even an ATI 4650 at 720P should be able to rival onlive.
Bonus: Captcha for this post was 'frauds'.
see: http://www.sailonline.org/
If this is using Flash to display the images on the client, does this mean we'll be able to play PC games on Flash using Phones/Tablets/mini-netbooks with hardware decoding?
I've seen a demo of Everquest running on an Android phone, just remoting the display and sending key presses back to the game running on the decent gaming rig. It was actually usable for alot of game playing.
This has some amazing potential, as long as the latency isn't too bad. I can see this working great for alot of games that are out there now. Just FPS'like games I can see there being issues.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
You do not own games you pay full price for! and you have to keep paying on live to use them!
So you are better off useing your own system and buying the games that can be used with out having to pay a fee JUST TO PLAY! also no INPUT LAG AND NO NEED FOR a 5MEG plus full time data stream.
just wait for the comcast cap to kill this and lag / use to go up after beta is over and more people use this.
No matter what the onlive reps say, they are not going to be able to get your input lag to a playable 50ms.
...It probably is. It's a lot more likely that we're looking a pump-and-dump scheme in the face than a legitimate service. Unless they've discovered some quantum computer that we don't yet know about and overcome that pesky speed of light thing, they are not going to release a product that will work for anything other than turn-based games.
1. INPUT LAG. You have to add their input lag to your television's. If you were near unbearable on input lag before, Onlive will put you over the hump. All of a sudden, it will feel like everyone else is wallhacking, or maybe that you've just suddenly become a bad shot. This will not be enjoyable in any way. And can any computer, even your own, screen cap in fraps, compress video, and even send it over the lan in a manner timely enough to play twitchy shooters or other games requiring quick reactions?
2. PEAK USAGE
They're going to have to either waste tons of money having a bunch of idle computers waiting for the four heaviest gaming hours of the day, or they're going to have to wait in queues for a half hour or more. The only people willing to wait for long queues are already playing WoW, so there's nobody left who is willing to use Onlive.
3. IF IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE...
I heard lack of lan is to control video game leagues / lock out leagues from doing there own thing and not useing battle net.
No thanks,
May if they put the severs at your cable headend or area superhead end then you may be able to over come some of the input delay but peak use is a big killer just like how cable VOD can get over loaded. But I hear HOT CABLE (Israel) is working on some thing like this.
No ownership. Less FPS than an NES. Lame.
Also this system will never work with twitch gaming, like unreal tournament.
I'd certainly agree, yet UT3 is on the list of launch games, so they seem to think it's good enough.
All depends on your net connection, and your standards.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I'm playing my games through VNC!
I can't even remotely imagine playing ME2 on this kind of setup. Online games can hide latency by having the client extrapolate, but what they're selling seems totally unworkable. The internet is not a real time system, even with a tolerance of 100 ms or so.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
Borderlands is being shown on this service at E3 show floor as well.
Will it run on Linux?
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Crysis is not on this list.
You do not own games you pay full price for!
Question is whether you actually have to pay full price. If so, it would be idiotic to sign up for it.
However there are services like Metaboli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaboli) where you pay a monthly fee to play all the games they offer for no extra charge; for as long as you have a subscription. It's a fairly reasonable fee too (10-20€ per month depending on which games you want).
Point is, it's not out of the question that the price will be reasonable for something you just rent.
You can only sign up to be allowed to sign up, which is what they've been doing for quite some time now.
The Comcast cap is fine with normal uses of streaming video. You might possibly run into problems if you use it to watch streaming video 12 hours a day, but normal people have these things called "jobs" or "school" that mean they don't actually do that.
So far I have not seen evidence of anyone managing to hit Comcast's cap unless they were constantly pirating movies. I am still waiting for someone to prove that they've been disadvantaged without breaking the law.
Because we can believe everything that Blizz say purely because they say it :)
But you DON'T pay full price for them and you DON'T have to buy a console. That's the entire point of their system - you just pay a small subscription fee which is a fraction of the price of even one game.
Actually, in the purchase process they state that you have access to the game at least until a specified date (2013 on the game I bought) and that if the service goes down you'll get a prorated refund. Seems fair to me.
you just pay a small subscription fee
That's not correct. Their site states that their subscription fee "will not include any games, content or other services that are offered for purchase"; only demos and social stuff.
So you have to pay the subscription on top of whatever games will cost.
This is the problem I have with the service. I understand it is for anyone with any sort of entry level computer to be allow to play these high-end games. But the eventually $15/mo basically buys you a new system every three years. Their subsidizing their own hardware with your subscription fee. I think the service is rally cool, I know of a few beta players who say it really does work with pretty decent latency (*usually* within the 70-ish milliseconds claimed by OnLive - characterized by their comments of "it responds pretty well" - yes, I know I'm guesstimating here). But paying for games AND paying to keep in the service (or lose my games) - this is the part I am having trouble swallowing.
That being said, I am trying to get in the "founding fathers" promotion that gives you the first year for free with a "free" games, If I get in, yeah I'll try it! If some RPGs are available for rent, I might play them that way instead of paying full price - if it works well.
Canadians can't sign up, despite the fact that about a quarter of our population is within the 1000 mile range of the DC OnLive location. For example, Montreal is about 590 miles away, well under the 1000 mile limit.
According to Onlive, you ALSO have to buy the games.
but what would they know.
"but will not include any games, content or other services that are offered for purchase, and which must be purchased separately."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is what I see...
1920 x 1200 (Resolution) x 32 bit (4 Bytes Color Depth) x 60 Hz (Refresh) = 4423680000 bit/s = 4423.680 mbit/s or 527 Mbytes/sec
Therefore, they must compress the video stream. So with this I get lag, bad video quality and compression artifacts.
This assumes that I have a high speed internet connection that is not capped... At 2mbit stream rate (but they required a 5mbit connection, therefore you would have some spare capacity for overhead and network issues), you would only get about ~22 hours (~45min/day) per month with a 150GB cap (assuming no overhead, other traffic or other users). I also know people that could push 22 hours in one weekend.
I've tried to get my head around this, but even if it works uniformly for everyone I'd have a really hard time seeing it be any more than a niche market. Between GameStop for consoles, Steam for the PC (and now Mac), and increasing options for DLC, it's going to be a really hard-sell to gamers who are used to owning something physical that they can trade in (even for horrible rates). I bet broadband will kill them. Net neutrality is going to fail, unfortunately, so people are going to get capped and have overage fees. Better to invest in a nice used XBOX 360 ($150 or less sometimes).
I played some games just like this on youtube and it was awesome!!! There's like an awesoem video at high frame rate of a badass alien coming at you, and then you click in the box that takes you to the next video of his head exploding and it's so cool! I can't wait to see the videos that OnLive (tm) has for me to click on! I hope they can switch between videos as fast as youtube does so I don't lag much. This is so cool because it means that game video makers will be able to make game videos for me to buy without having to fear that I own them.
I still play Age of Mythology often. That's a lot more than 2 or 3 years. It will continue to be playable also. You can join me buy purchasing the game for under $20 U.S.....
You have to pay the subscription fee AND the game fee. Games through OnLive won't be free with the subscription.
And from the beta, games like UT3 are a lag-tastic piece of crap. The 1/4-1/2 second the reticule keeps moving after you release the control is a deal breaker for action games. For Barbie Horse Adventures or Magic: The Electronic Game it would be fine, but who's going to pay a subscription fee just for the chance to pay for games like that?