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OnLive Aiming To Become Netflix of Games
donniebaseball23 writes "OnLive may have its long-term sights on entertainment besides games, especially with the hiring of Pandora executive Etienne Handman, but for now the cloud-based service is laser focused on taking a chunk of the games market. It has launched a Netflix-inspired all-you-can-eat plan for $9.99/month. 'The meteoric growth of Netflix reflects the enormous consumer demand for flat-rate instant-play media,' said Steve Perlman, OnLive Founder and CEO. 'OnLive PlayPack is uniquely positioned to address this demand in the realm of high-performance video games, instantly delivering games ... to TVs, PCs, Macs and iPad, and soon Android tablets, smartphones and Blu-ray players.'"
Steve Perlman has made his living off of tech-deficient investors and hapless early adopters.
With Xband, he had to contend with limited bandwidth.
With WebTV, he had to contend with limited processing power
With onlive, he has to contend with the biggest hurdle of all: the speed of light.
Controller input lag + rendering lag + video compression lag + television input lag + stream decoding + network lag itself is not going to make for a great experience. Watch any youtube video with Onlive and Unreal Tournament III. Notice how the player is playing on the easiest settings and requires fairly stationary or predictable targets just to connect with a shot.
This system will be great for people who play facebook apps and turn-based strategy games, but everyone else is just going to be frustrated.
Unless their tech is based on magic there is no way they can get mass market appeal. No one is going to put up with games that feel unresponsive/laggy. Gamefly is a vastly better option.
It's called Gamefly.
How many times has onlive changed their payment plans in the last 6 months? How about the last week? This is just another desperate attempt for them to try and drum up business for a service which really has no market. The "game reviewers who will sit next door with a 100 MB fiber connection and give you a glorifying review" segment isn't that large.
With an increasing number of ISPs decreasing their caps, inconsistent service, and the slightest hiccup breaking a game, this service benefits no one beyond those who really want to play super high end turn based games and would rather pay more per month to play them over the course of a few years than it would cost them to build a machine to play the games in the first place. Everyone else is taking a massive crap shoot and basically wasting money on rentals.
All I really want out of this company is to know what they put in the water when they meet the venture capitalists.
I understand he's trying to draw an easy to quote analogy, but you can't just apply a magic codec to an application binary to turn it into a streaming game. The truth is that Steam is the Netflix of games, it's where everyone is going to buy their games now and gamers have the same love for Steam that people have for Netflix.
I would say this service is acceptable for single-player or slow paced multi-player games only. I tried it out about a month ago; hopped on a single-player game, and the while the latency wasn't too bad for that particular game, I would never attempt a fast paced multi-player game. The resolution it renders at isn't exactly spectacular either. It ends up looking like a high quality Youtube video.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Unfortunately, publishers like EA are coming up with stuff like the OnlinePass, which must be bought by the person who buys your game, devaluing the second hand sale.
If you have purchased a used game and the code originally included has already been activated, you will need to purchase EA SPORTS Online Pass access from within your game by choosing PURCHASE ONLINE ACCESS from the Code Redemption screen.
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First: disclosure. I worked at OnLive as an engineer for two years; I do not currently work there; I do not have any financial stake or equity in the company. I have a very active Steam account, a Netflix account which I use almost exclusively through streaming to an AppleTV, as well as an OnLive account. I do most of my gaming through a dedicated gaming rig running Windows.
Does OnLive "work"? Yes, very well, IF you have a high-quality broadband connection (you really need at least 5mbps for the best experience, though it will autoscale to deal with somewhat lower bandwidths). Video quality can be very good; though it is not quite the same as a direct video connection to a high-end gaming rig, for a large number of people it's good enough. The capture-encode part of the cycle is very fast, as is the decode-display part, typically in single-digits-of-milliseconds. All other latency is network latency, which brings up to geography and last-mile. You need to be within a few hundred miles of one of OnLive's data centers for the best experience. Your ISP has to not suck. The technology is certainly there, with the caveat of the geographical limitations. To be a mass-market success, OnLive will need many data centers. They aren't at that point yet; getting to that point will be a major part of whether OnLive truly succeeds, and major extended high-density metro areas will always come before rural. The idea of being able to play games that normally require a kilobuck computer, i.e. Crysis, on a cheapass computer with integrated video, is compelling for people who aren't willing or able to maintain and continually upgrade a dedicated gaming rig. Recall the recent announcement of Visio building an OnLive client natively into a TV. And if you need a demo of how little horsepower is actually needed... you can download an OnLive viewer for the iPad for free, and spectate on folks who are playing their games. (obviously, the latter is something best done over WiFi, for latency and bandwidth reasons, but the point is that a single-core ARM has all the oomph needed to get the job done. The client is truly lightweight.)
Do you "own" the games? No. Neither do you "own" an MMO; it's the MMO subscription model rather than the retail physical-goods model. Whether that's good or bad depends upon your outlook, which is not a basis of factual discussion; it's perspective. There are excellent arguments for and against, and I ask that people with a strongly-held opinion one way or another recognize that people with different opinions have different needs than themselves. For some people, the subscription model is ideal. For others, it just doesn't work. This isn't intended to be one size fits all.
Is it relevant to gamers with dedicated gaming PCs? To an extent. For some, the ability to play high-end games through legacy, entry-level computers (Shader model 2.0 or better and you're in!) is critical; there are far more people with such computers than dedicated gaming rigs. For others who own and maintain high-end gaming rigs, it's not a factor from a "what games can be played here" perspective. However, you just can't beat OnLive as an instant demo platform. Even if you have a liquid-cooled dual-580GTX SLI rig with an Intel Core i7 overclocked to 4.5GHz, there is value in the absolute immediacy of demos without downloads, install procedures, dealing with Starforce or SecuRom copy protection, pirated games coming with a "little extra software", and games of variable quality taking a dump all over your registry.
Can OnLive succeed? I think so, though they (OnLive) need to recognize that OnLive is no longer a technological play. The tech is there, and though OnLive has a substantial lead, it is inevitable that there will be competitors trying to solve the same problem which will eventually become "good enough". OnLive will sink or swim on non-technical factors: whether they can get the game publishers to commit
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.