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OnLive CEO On Post-Launch Status, Game Licenses

Posted by Soulskill on from the cloud-gaming-doesn't-involve-lakitu dept.

CNET has a lengthy interview with OnLive CEO Steve Perlman about how the service is shaping up almost a month after launch. Demand seems to have outstripped their expectations, and it required some quick server expansion to compensate. He also addresses a common concern among gamers — that the licenses for games could expire in three years. Perlman says, "It's less of an issue about the licenses evaporating, and more of an issue of whether or not we continue to maintain the operating systems and the graphics cards to run those games. If a game is tied to a particular Nvidia or ATI card, or if it's relying on a particular version of Windows with different drivers, we can't be sure that those will continue to be available as our servers age and need to be replaced. If it's a popular game that can't run on old hardware anymore, the publishers can do an upgrade for the game. Also, servers usually do last longer than three years, so chances are we'll keep running them. But we have a legal obligation to disclose what might happen. I think the probability of us pulling a game in three years is on the order of 0.1 percent. It's also highly unlikely that a game server will evaporate after three years, but we have to allow for that possibility." He also goes into future plans for expanding OnLive, both in terms of the content they offer and the devices they may support. The Digital Foundry blog followed up the latency tests we discussed with a full review, if you'd like an unbiased opinion of the service.

18 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Uh... by sonicmerlin · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No no, the problem is exactly the licenses evaporating, or rather people's accounts being closed and a user subsequently losing out on all their purchased games. I think a simple, extremely reasonable solution would be to allow users to download and play the game locally if they wish a la Steam. Give them both the option to play in the cloud (much more convenient) and locally (sense of security and ownership) and you have an award winning service that destroys your Valve-hosted competitor.

    1. Re:Uh... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I suspect that they would find the economics of doing that either untenable or unhelpful...

      Presumably, since a game that you must be connected to a fast, low-latency internet connection to play at all, even single-player, has lower utility than a game playable standalone(and such a game is pretty much immune to piracy, and revocable at any time) the OnLive people can negotiate lower per-unit prices from the publishers. That and they can presumably do some license sharing, since not everyone will be playing a given game at a given time.

      If they give their customers the option of cloud or download, these advantages evaporate. They'll likely face the same per unit costs as any other download seller, plus the costs of keeping their servers and lights on. If they offer the download option as a separate service, priced separately and distinct from the cloud stuff, they would avoid that; but their download service would be just another commodity CDN with a game-focused website slapped on top. How many of those are there now? At least a few that already matter enough to be called "incumbents" and dozens of more or less interchangeable minor competitors, at least.

    2. Re:Uh... by grumbel · · Score: 3, Informative

      Why do you have to set a limit on a license for a fully purchased game?

      Maybe because they are actually honest and tell you the limitations of their system upfront instead of pretending that the system will run forever and there never ever will be a problem with it? You know, pretending that a service will run forever simply doesn't make it so.

    3. Re:Uh... by hedwards · · Score: 3, Informative

      Read the ToS more carefully, Steam calls it a purchase, but treats it much more like a license. People can and do lose entire accounts worth of games when somebody hacks in. And even if you get the games back, if the person got you banned then they won't undo it.

    4. Re:Uh... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There is no way in hell that I would touch their model, I'm just trying to understand their motivation and behavior structure as accurately as possible.

      It is, unequivocally, the case that "cloud gaming" is a far bigger attack on your ability to "own" what you buy than even the nastiest of DRM systems, and it is only logical to assume that the company behind it would do absolutely anything to you that isn't actually illegal if they thought it would improve their balance sheet by a nickel.

      However, as best I can tell, arbitrarily cutting off players of old games(unless the cost of supporting them gets too high, or the number of players in a given region drops below a certain value) is not an economically rational behavior, and I would, thus, not expect them to do it.

      I find their value proposition deeply uncompelling, and losing that much control over what I buy distasteful on ethical grounds(and, unlike something like Steam, they aren't even offering a good deal in exchange for your principles and your ownership rights...) and I have no intention of signing up; but I still base my analysis of their expected behavior on the assumption that they are value-rational, amoral, and money-seeking, rather than evil per se. Evil is, after all, only sometimes profitable.

    5. Re:Uh... by Cornelius+the+Great · · Score: 2, Informative

      Read the ToS more carefully, Steam calls it a purchase, but treats it much more like a license. People can and do lose entire accounts worth of games when somebody hacks in.

      Not a problem- ask nicely and Valve will restore your account.

      And even if you get the games back, if the person got you banned then they won't undo it.

      You're referring to a VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) ban, which will ban you from VAC-enabled servers. That doesn't keep you from playing the game- you'll be able to play on non-VAC servers. However, Valve's policy is strict for a reason- anyone who has been caught cheating could claim their account has been hacked and then anyone could continue playing on VAC servers.

      Multiplayer is a completely different animal when dealing with software licensing. You're never guaranteed that the "official" servers will stay up indefinitely, and if the game lacks support for dedicated servers (ahem, MW2), then you're completely out of the online at some point in the future. Needless to say, VAC-bans are the least of my worries.

      It's a fair tradeoff, and the ToS is reasonable enough to me that I've made most of my game purchases through Steam. Plus, their DRM is breakable if Valve ever goes away, so just make sure you make backups of your games, use a strong password, and be wary of phishing pages and keyloggers (a good general rule anyway), and you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

      --
      Sigs are for losers
    6. Re:Uh... by drc003 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes, they are setting a 3 year limit. I'm not talking about what they are "SAYING", I'm talking about what they are setting up to support in legal terms. People can say whatever they want. You can sign your house over to someone in your family while they are "saying" they will never kick you out and sell the house. However if at anytime they decide to do so they can and will.

  2. Is it just me? by ledow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is anyone else really sick of hearing about this dead horse that they're trying to flog?

    Latency claims - false.
    Framerate claims - false.
    Image quality claims - false.
    "Blockbuster" games claims - false.
    Bandwidth required - 2.5 Gb / hour (so the average UK broadband customer would exceed their monthly allowance in less than 10-15 hours a month).
    Overall system capability to handle powerful games - looking false already but there's nothing on the system to really tax them yet.

    Pricing - slightly more than just buying the damn game from a shop (and "owning" it forever), and actually cheaper to run it on your own PC even if you take into account the graphics card investment necessary to run those games (but, come on, my laptop cost no more than usual and comes with a card that can laugh at most of those games in bigger resolutions - are there still systems out there that can't do Half-life 2 at 60fps or equivalent?).

    It was a nice idea, but it was derided for making exactly those claims that turned out to be false. Some people may buy it but I'd be doubtful they'd keep it for very long. Probably because they don't know how to load / run Steam. If you'd pitched it at casual gamers, it would have sold millions and you could run be running every grannies Wii-style games for them, but you aimed it at fast-paced, FPS-gamers and the like, requiring huge investment in CPU, RAM, graphics cards and latency reduction. World of Goo is on their store lists - that will *work* perfectly in such a setup - low CPU/GPU demand, no latency issues, easily compressible graphics. Saying it could run "any" game was just silly. If you'd pitched it as a "no-maintenance Wii replacement" without the hassle of sticky fingers, scratched disks, special hardware, constant upgrades, etc. then you could have recouped your investment by now. As it is, most people are laughing at you. Give it up now, before the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own claims.

    1. Re:Is it just me? by Svartalf · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, they won't "have to do" anything at all. We already have the situation where they're flogging HIGH bandwidth stuff and they've got caps on landline and mobile internet access.

      If you think any single application's going to force them to change the caps anytime soon, I've got this nice oceanside property on the Florida coast to sell you...

      --
      I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
    2. Re:Is it just me? by BForrester · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The more likely case is that ISPs will
        - not improve their infrastructure
        - charge exorbitant prices for those who exceed the bandwidth cap
        - offer exorbitantly priced "HD gamer" packages for those who want low-latency, high cap plans
        - berate users (aka service abusers) who consistently use most of the bandwith promised them in their contract

      For many of us, this is already status quo.

    3. Re:Is it just me? by tbcpp · · Score: 2, Informative

      Have you actually used the service? I tried it out (I'm a founding member whoop-dee-doo). And it's exactly the opposite of what you state about World-of-Goo. I found UT3 perfectly playable, with very little noticeable lag. In fact on my second Team death match, I ranked at the top of the list for kills. It's about the same sort of lag I'd expect from using the average bluetooth mouse. World of Goo (and other 2d games) on the other hand was unplayable, the mouse lags so much that it's almost unplayable. So yeah...I'd say your general statement was false. Yes, Latency is an issue, and yes, the video quality is bad. But the heavy 3d games run waaaay better than the lighter 2d games.

      --
      Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
  3. Utter crap by crossmr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Lot's of people, including me, called it as soon as it was announced. It is an absolute failure, we've got screenshots that look horrible, latency issues, games that are so bad you can't see crosshairs.. I mean this is just a disaster. They should close from embarrassment and try and pretend the whole thing never happened. If they wanted to target turn based strategy games or something they might have something.. but their service simply can't service the market they want and the market they want doesn't really benefit from their service.

    1. Re:Utter crap by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Crossmr is being a touch blunt; but he has a point.

      The real problem is, hardcore twitch gamers aren't going to be happy; but the further you get from twitch gamers, the less valuable the "cloud gaming" features become. Were it possible to serve them, twitch gamers would benefit the most; because they require the most expensive hardware, upgrade the most frequently, play the newest games that may not have been ported yet, etc. The further you get from them, the less valuable the service is. At the other extreme, the "casual" gamer, much of what they play is Flash-based(and thus about as "multiplatform" as anything currently available), and has resource requirements satisfied by a netbook. The technophobe market is pretty well served by a mix of casual flash that you just have to go to a web page to get, or (now relatively cheap) consoles that you can get brick-and-mortar buys/rentals for, pop in and play.

      The set of games that are, simultaneously, "non twitch" and "highly system intensive" and "tolerant of relatively low resolution" is vanishingly small. Dwarf Fortress?

    2. Re:Utter crap by crossmr · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes.
      That one.

      However, despite the incredible achievement in streaming gameplay with relatively low latency, the bottom line is that the gameplay experience is not better than what we already have - by and large it's tangibly worse.

      I mean if we want to cherry pick comments.
      Just how much are you being paid for your comments today?

      The varying quality of the graphics is questionable, and the lag is best described as "better than expected" - nowhere near the claims that have been made for the system, and still measurably inferior to current standards. It's just a question of how your personal perception level will interpret it as to whether it's a game-breaker or not.

      Let's quote a little more since you seemed to miss it.

      In terms of buying games, the prices for new titles are too high and the selection of games is uninspiring. The notion of paying so much for what is measurably an inferior product compared to the physical disc means that OnLive simply cannot be taken seriously at this point in time - especially when you don't own the games you are buying.

      In other words, it's a joke.

      So yes, it does sound like a complete and utter failure.

      Perhaps by the time expensive next-generation hardware is unleashed upon us OnLive's value proposition will increase accordingly, but until then the value just isn't there.

      and hey who could forget the paragraph immediately after what you quoted

      However, even in this regard, lag doesn't meet OnLive's on-the-record promises, and elsewhere the system comes up short. The claims of 720p60 don't stack up compared to the reality of the service (unless you are describing the technical make-up of the transmitted video stream rather than actual game performance) and the quality of the image in challenging situations is poor and no match whatsoever for playing the same game locally. OnLive generally seems to be a system that can work well for certain games, but really isn't very well suited for others.

      So again, how much you being paid to astroturf?

    3. Re:Utter crap by delinear · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Agreed, I don't think anyone here, even the hard core doubters, are willing this to fail, I'd love to be able to log into my entire games catalogue and play it from pretty much any computer I happen to be sat at, it's just that people recognise the massive limitations at the moment and find it incredibly difficult to believe this will take off. There would have to be a sea change in the availability of cheap, high speed, uncapped or at least very high capped broadband before this could be viable (even then it leaves the latency question, but it would be suitable for a number of genres that don't require twitch responses), and whether that will happen before OnLive's investors lose interest is the big question.

  4. Yeah right.... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ""It's less of an issue about the licenses evaporating, and more of an issue of whether or not we continue to maintain the operating systems and the graphics cards to run those games."

    Whatever... I have a copy of the really old Unreal Tournament that works great on windows 7 with a modern video card. his "issue" is a non issue and is used as a red herring to justify killing customers licenses.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  5. Make this right. by xmorg · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yesterday , BP made it right. Some of you don't believe. some of you are still angry; and that's ok. I'm xmorg, and ill be here as long as it takes to make this right.

  6. Dejobaan's Guarantee to Yoooooooou! by MiceHead · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sooooooo! So. We're Dejobaan Games, a small indie (redundant?) studio responsible for a game called AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. If you've used OnLive, you've probably seen the damned thing listed at the top of their games selection because they sort alphabetically. Our next game will probably be called something annoying like !!!00000LoL and be even higher on the list.

    I digress.

    I like OnLive; I like the guys I've met that work for OnLive; I'm also the Hair Club President. I want them to succeed, because the more ways for folks to get games, the better. Here's our guarantee: If you pick Aaaaa! up on OnLive, and they stop carrying our game in 3 years, we'll give you an offline copy. I'm not sure if folks are having tech issues, but honestly, the licensing issue is really easy for us to fix. :)

    --
    We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.