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."

Comments

OR...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:Good for them

[bondsbw]

Have you actually tried it? In my experience, it's much better than you would think.

Let's consider the obvious lag issue. Did you realize that it actually removes common multiplayer lag? You know, the kind where you shoot at a guy and he doesn't get hit because he had moved 300 pixels to the left. That doesn't exist in OnLive since all the processing is done on the same network (maybe even the same computer) as the other gamers. In this respect, OnLive performs much like a LAN or even local game.

I'm not trying to ignore the click-to-response lag. It exists. But it really is minuscule, to the point that most people I know can't tell much difference over running the game locally.

more anti-consumer 'choice' in the market

[epyT-R]

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.

Re:more anti-consumer 'choice' in the market

[brjndr]

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.

[...]

perhaps the terms have changed since the last time I looked at this, but I doubt it.

They have changed, there is no subscription fee anymore.

Re:more anti-consumer 'choice' in the market

[epyT-R]

yup. I fail to see the benefit for me. I do see the benefit for the publishers. even without a sub fee, I'm still eating massive bw and I lose control over the media.

Re:more anti-consumer 'choice' in the market

[epyT-R]

sure.. or maybe onlive or the publisher has decided that one of your favorite titles isn't making enough money anymore, so they can it. What happened to xbox-classic's multiplayer?

Re:more anti-consumer 'choice' in the market

[drinkypoo]

They have changed, there is no subscription fee anymore.

To my mind the lack of guaranteed recurring income makes them more likely to go under, resulting in NONE of my games being playable...

Onlive has changed my life!

[mykos]

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

Re:The main point of onlive

[uofitorn]

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.

That's not correct

[Sycraft-fu]

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.