Slashdot Mirror
OnLive To Be Built Into Vizio Devices
Gamasutra reports that cloud gaming service OnLive has reached an agreement with Vizio to integrate OnLive directly into the hardware manufacturer's TVs and Blu-ray players.
"Vizio also announced that it will introduce ... tablets and smartphones based on Google's Android operating system that integrate the gaming service through its Via Plus ecosystem. OnLive is already publicly available for Apple's iPad, but that app is exclusively for spectating other people who are playing Onlive through PCs or the MicroConsole. Perlman said Onlive is coming to Vizio's mobile devices with playable games. ... Perlman also said that thanks to the open nature of the Android platform, manufacturers are creating more traditional game controllers for Android tablets. Some resemble a gamepad cut in half, where one half snaps on either side of the table screen, Perlman said. Certain Android tablets will also potentially work with Onlive's official controller, if the mobile device supports the appropriate RF interface."
Even the devices are vicious these days!
I guess these kinds of comments are what happens when pointless crap gets posted this late at night. Only random trolls are around to leave any comments.
Or hey! I could use this XBox thingie or this Wii or ANY NUMBER OF CONSOLES ALREADY OWNED BY THE TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC.
Cloud gaming: all the fun of the arcade but without the strange, sweaty man who comes by to empty the machine on Fridays (he's tapping your credit card once a month miles away).
Good for them, but I'm still saying way the hell away. This may appeal to the casual market, but I can't see myself ever wanting to use this service. It can never be as optimal a gaming experience as a local machine.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
lets pay full retail price for the game + monthly onlive subscription so we can:
1. get on a treadmill that gets harder and harder to get off each time a new game is purchased, because if a subscription is ever canceled all purchased games are gone forever.
2. get heavily bandwidth constrained lossy 720p video streams.
3. repeatedly peg bandwidth caps on our internet connections just by playing comparatively few hours of gaming a month.
4. get laggy input
5. lose control over yet another thing we're supposedly purchasing. (spare me the legal crap, games are presented as sales, not leases or rentals)
perhaps the terms have changed since the last time I looked at this, but I doubt it.
Shut up, COWARD!
Don't feed the trolls. Feed my nuts into your mouth instead.
I, for one, am glad to see that Onlive is going to be included in a tablet. In fact, it should be included in every device with a display!
Before Onlive, I was throwing away over $50,000 per year on expensive consoles and PC upgrades, which is an average amount that any family can spend on gaming every year. Not only that, but I couldn't run games even on my netbook or portable devices like I can with Onlive!
When I saw how low Onlive's prices were compared to the $50,000 a year it costs to maintain my consoles/PC upgrades, I knew right away that this was the service for me.
Now for a low monthly fee*, I can get great Onlive service with zero latency whatsoever in all the latest games. It seems that Onlive has conquered the laws of physics!
Be sure to pre-order the Onlive MicroConsole like I did. I'm very certain it will be a big improvement on what is already a great Onlive experience!
*Games sold separately
Company X makes deal with company Y, determined to bring easily accessible Z to market. News at 11...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
No. These kinds of comments are what happen when taco gave Anonymous and 4chan all sorts of publicity starting a few months ago. The quality of discussion has decreased dramatically with the influx of new posters.
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
I guess you weren't here 10 years ago:)
That's "OnMom"
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If they aren't charging a subscription, then all their money comes from game sales. Ok, but they only make a fraction of the sale price. A $50 game is going to net them maybe $25, and I doubt even that much as online/download sellers can't command as much of the cut as regular stores.
Now so long as people buy lots of games and don't play any one game too much, that'll work fine. However if people buy games and play them to death, that'll screw them over. Their costs are not going to be low for this kind of thing. Bandwidth alone is substantial, in particular if they do end up offering higher definition streams as they claim they plan. Hardware is also a big deal, they can't pack things in like a file hosting service, games demand a certain amount of power, and higher end games can demand a lot particularly if they are to be played high detail, as Onlive likes to advertise.
So if someone buys a game and then plays it for 500 hours, which does happen with multi-player games, that is a real problem for them.
I think they plan to start charging a subscription if they can become popular. It is the only way I can see them staying profitable in the long run, unless they simply start limiting games and saying "You've played that enough, you have to buy something else now."
For games to have no more lag than the transit to the Onlive servers, they have to be games that do LAN play or the like. While those exist, they aren't that common these days. Most games do client-server stuff. Now if Onlive hosted those servers, fine, but they don't. So say you are playing Bad Company 2. First you have to go to the Onlive data center where the game is processed for you, that then has to go out to the data center owned by gameservers.net, or whoever is hosting the given server you wish to play on.
What's more, even for LAN type games, low latency between clients would only apply if all people were talking to the same data center. That's not the case for people spread out. If someone is in CA and someone is in NY, they'll be going to different Onlive data centers, which will then have to talk to each other.
As for the interface lag, it'll depend on the kind of game, and how good your connection is to them. I'm not aware of any formal scientific research, but informal research on AVSForum seems to suggest that in the 4+ frames of lag category, interface lag is noticeable to just about everyone (and some people can notice less). That translates to about 67ms of latency. That's on the low side for the Internet, you need a good connection and a nearby data center to get that in particular with real data (remember the time it takes to transfer the data has to be factored in as well). It is doable, but not everyone can count on that.
However it gets worse because that lag adds to any monitor lag you have. Monitors aren't immediate. Most lag a bit. Real high speed TN ones are often only a couple ms, or sometimes even sub, ms, but many others lag a frame or two, or sometimes more. So if you have, say, a Dell 2407 which has 34ms of latency and you have a 80ms actual response time (meaning time from when you request data till the time you've completely received it) from Onlive you've got a total of 114ms of latency, meaning what you see on the screen will be about 7 frames behind of what is happening. You WILL notice that. If you play with it you may start mentally compensating, but you'd notice the improvement in a hurry if you switched to a system that didn't lag.
I've messed with situations with interface lag (VMWare over RDP used to not be able to virtualize the mouse cursor and so had interface lag) and you can learn to deal with it but it is far from ideal and when you go back to a low lag situation it feels SO much better.
I'm not saying Onlive is unworkable, I just question if the high interface lag, and low resolution (it only tries for 720p and with a 1mbps stream has bad smearing, macroblocking, and chroma resolution) is better than just getting a $100 mid-range graphics card.
My TV went kaput on Xmas eve so I bought a new one last week. I found a good deal on a 58" Plasma without the bells and whistles like Netflix built in for $1100. 5 years ago I used a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV to watch TV & Movies I purchased over iTunes.
Now I use my XBox360 mostly for streaming Netflix in HD.
I didn't spend $2000 or $3000 on a new TV because I figured it's only another 2 - 3 years to where the XBox services are built into the TV and it's all "cloud" based or whatever. I figured I'd save the money now and wait and see what is out in another couple years.
I'm pretty sure that by 2015, I won't have a computer in my house like I do now. Already it doesn't get much use these days. I do my surfing and facebooking on my iPad. I have a docking station for writing long emails for the iPad. But even then I answer more emails on my phone than anything these days.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Did you buy your UID? First, there were the "BSD is dying" trolls, then the GNAA trolls, then the "I ate bad shellfish and exploded in my pants" trolls, and now this. There's a reason why Slashdot has/had one of the best moderation systems out there -- terrible trolls have always lived under its bridges.
Guys:
-There is no monthly fee
-Only the brand-new games are full price, and the store has sales as often as Steam does.
-The latency issues are gone, give a demo a try. It is literally flawless.
and the BIGGEST point that no one seems to understand:
-The ENTIRE SERVICE can be upgraded indefinitely. After they fleshed out the latency issues they've been steadily increasing graphics quality, both in-game and the compression. You fucking morons seem to think it launched and they did nothing to improve it afterwards. Stop jumping to ignorant conclusions.
After watching OnLive struggle with gaining market acceptance, this is probably their best bet but people who want quality gaming experiences will stay away. They dropped the subscription fee probably out of sheer terror that they'd fail miserably. Now Android and TVs? Ultimately it looks to be headed to hotels to replace that crappy system you often find to entertain the kids. Sadly, no matter what they do there's the TANSTAAFL principle. Someone has to pay for all that computing power in carrier hotels throughout the US, plus you have crackdowns on bandwidth at the end-user level. Give it a couple more years and we won't hear any more from OnLive.
However, the lag seems now, OnLive's biggest challenge will be to maintain playable connection speeds as the player base grows in number. Ask the millions of console/pc gamers out there now. Server load always is a problem and the OnLive solution does not address this.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
games become portable
OnLive games won't run on the bus or train, unlike DS games, PSP games, iPod touch games, and laptop games.
even potentially iPhone and iPad
Service for an iPhone or iPad costs at least twelve times what I pay Virgin Mobile USA for my current phone. I can't foresee a lot of people on budget voice plans (e.g. Virgin's $60 per year for occasional use) upgrading to premium phone service just for games, especially with the monthly transfer caps that the carriers have enacted.
perfect piracy protection
Is it piracy for me to program a game with the same rules as an existing game? I know some companies that seem to think so.
Wow between this and yesterdays announcement that they will have sub-$300 3d tv's by the end of 2011 it looks like maybe the others should start taking Vizio seriously. I have Vizio in my bedroom that I picked up cheap...figured it was garbage but at a good price...so far it has outlast the samsung I had the living room and actually has what at least to me appears to be a better picture than the one that replaced it. I really dont see OnLive taking over the consoles any time soon but for the casual crowd it may make quite a dent.