Onlive 'Console'
As I’m sure most of you are aware, at the Game Developers Conference a new gaming platform was announced called OnLive. The concept is simple rather than Download or buy games for your PC or Consoles, you subscribe to OnLive on your PC or Laptop or if you prefer you can play games through your television by purchasing an adapter for it. The Games are streamed from a online server, so it takes away the need for you to have a top of the range PC or even space of your HDD to store the games and the idea is that you just choose what games you want to play from the server and your away. Now don’t get me wrong, i think the idea is brilliant however there are some issues which will stop it from hitting the mainstream anytime soon.
The Fact you constantly have to be online to play
You may think that this isn’t a problem since most people have broadband at present, but the fact you have to be online all the time presents its own issues. The first and most obvious point is that what if your ISP or internet isn’t working? Well basically if this happens there will be no gaming for you and going on my experience with broadband in the UK, don’t be surprised if your Internet cuts out while your half way through a game on multiple occasions. The next issue this brings is that not everyone has fast Internet and unlimited bandwidth, unless your lucky enough to have both expect your gaming experience on OnLive to be laggy and limited. The Lag will come when your inputs on the controller are a moment or 2 ahead of what it appears on screen and will become really annoying and put people off gaming. The reason it will be limited is that most ISP’s out there have download limits, now seeing in the UK a lot of ISPs limit you to around 10-15GB a month if your playing a game in HD you are only looking at a handful of hours of playing time a month.
Publisher Support
First off you may thinking, how is this a problem since it’s attracting publishers already but the problem is whenever or not they will be able to keep this support. Now with a lot of people not really having a decent Internet connection to use such a service the chances of OnLive getting a large amount of subscribers is to be frank slim. This will limit whenever or not publishers will continue to support such a gaming platform which isn’t giving them a big enough return.
People like Collections
At the end of the day people like to see what they have spent there money on and whenever its a game collection on their shelves or a harddrive full of games which they have downloaded from Steam, the majority of people like to also be able to access them whenever they like. Now with OnLive this won’t be the case, they won’t own any games whats so ever and this brings up the situation were what happens if someone whats to play an older title, but turns on OnLive only to find its no longer there anymore because its been removed for some reason or another, this wouldn’t occur if they owned the game.
People have spent hundreds on HDTV
While OnLive does support 720P the experience you will be getting won’t be the same of what you would get from a 720P game on a disk? Why you may ask, the reason is, is that chances are the games on OnLive will be heavily compressed meaning that textures may suffer, likewise the sound output won’t be as good since they won’t be able to stream uncompressed audio files over the Internet. There is also the factor of 1080P or ‘Full HD’, OnLive can’t support this so gamers who have invested in 1080P set ups won’t be interested in this as they will want a gaming platform which will make use of their expensive televisions.
However…
Its not all doom and gloom for Onlive, why i don’t see it even coming close to hitting the mainstream let alone challenging console gaming for a long long time, the idea is now out there. I can see it as a entry level for getting people back into PC gaming, since it will appeal to those who only play games a few times a month, but want to experience the likes of Crysis without shelling out a small fortune on a very powerful gaming PC. Still it has many obstacles it needs to clear and most the obstacles it needs to clear are the same ones Digital Distribution faces and are ones which neither OnLive or DD can clear by themselves. Overall however OnLive has given us a glimpse of how we will might be gaming in 20 years time, but for now its a nice concept and will remain that way for a long long time to come.
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March 26, 2009 at 3:15 am
[...] post by playstationgameruk [...]
March 26, 2009 at 4:16 am
While I think it’s interesting that you’ve given OnLive a critical evaluation, I don’t think your arguments build a sufficient foundation to support your conclusion, nor are they valid on their own merits. In fact, there’s no real research that would lead me to believe that your arguments are worth anything at all. You’ve cobbled together a few plausible, but unsubstantiated musings and drawn a hard and fast conclusion that OnLive isn’t a viable service and that it’s realization is 20 years (which is a pretty specific estimate, given no other tangible facts or data). I’ll try and walk through my critique of your analysis, but read it carefully because I doubt anyone else is going to do you that favor.
Your first point is based on the idea that connectivity is unreliable. Now, your support for this argument is your own patchy connection. My connection is pretty reasonable, but that’s no counter-argument, because we can’t draw generalizations from individual instances. Inference relies on multiple pieces of information. A line requires at least 2 points, and you’ve only given one. However, you may be right about download limits affecting the amount of data one can stream per month which could in fact make the OnLive service a moot point. As a side note (but not a qualm with your argument) it would seem to me that people only paying for limited bandwidth are probably using the their connection for simple purposes (email, chat, basic file sharing). We gamers, at least the hardcore ones who are seriously interested in a subscription gaming service probably have enough scratch for a decent internet connect, if we’re tossing around the absurd sums that companies are charging for games, not to mention consoles and peripherals. Also, you mention input lag, which representatives of OnLive have already stated has been limited to 1 millisecond. 1 millisecond is no lag at all, each frame of a TV broadcast (around 30 a second) takes more time than OnLive’s input lag. Journalists who have demoed OnLive have commented on its responsiveness. Moving on.
Your second argument purports to be about publisher support, but it’s really just a reiteration of your first point with a new and unrelated conclusion. You argue that publishers won’t support because there won’t be enough subscribers because connection speeds are ubiquitously poor. Where in the world did you get that idea? You mentioned yourself that there are already many publishers supporting the service, and there’s no reason to believe that they’ll decide to abandon the project until it shows proof of failure. How can you conclude that publishers and developers are poised to jump ship when OnLive was only announced yesterday.
Your third point attributes OnLive’s imminent failure to human nature. Our need, like magpies, to accrue stores of shiny discs that we can physically hold and put into the CD drive. Do you have an Mp3 collection? Is that not totally digital? Did Microsoft and Netflix not just launch a service on Xbox live to stream movies to gamers? Is it not making the companies money hand over fist? Isn’t instant access without the cumbersome burden of physical storage the beacon of emerging technology? The fact is, trends are in a position exactly the opposite of the one you construe. It’s so clear that OnLive is following an important trend in cloud computing that many have heralded for some time, and that we’re seeing emerge in applications across all platforms.
Finally, you suggest that HDTVs are pervasive and that gaming without them (albeit on computer screens which, by and large, have comparable or higher resolutions) is unthinkable to the gaming community. Firstly, I’ve personally read nothing about compressed textures, and it seems counter-intuitive to imagine a system that changes the fundamentals of the games code (which would be necessary to actually lower the resolution of the textures). If you mean that the stream itself will be compressed than that seems almost valid. Except that OnLive has stated that content is streamed at 720p, which means it has a specified resolution. If the resolution is constant, nothing is compressed, everything is rendered for that particular resolution, that data is transmitted to your computer, and your screen reproduces the image as it was sent. I don’t see any reason to believe that compression will be applied to the image.
I’m not sure why I bothered to write all of this. To be quite honest, I have no idea whether OnLive will be a success or failure. Some of your concerns I do share, although for different reason. There may in fact be input lag, if demand outstrips the company’s servers. There may be issues of connectivity for the same reasons. OnLive’s success may be it’s failure. But, your concerns as well as mine are groundless, as very little is known about the service at this point, which is fine. I just want to caution you against careless thinking, especially if you plan to expose your thoughts to the community at large. The impetus of your worries is sound, but the execution of your arguments is very flawed. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, as I can tell you rushed this (information has only been out a day or two and your article is littered with grammatical errors). Just take it easy and don’t jump into the fray unless you really have something to talk about. Otherwise you pollute and dilute the pool of information out there regarding whatever you’re writing about. And that’s a disservice to everyone, including yourself.
March 26, 2009 at 10:07 am
In response to the first comment.
It looks like the author has a right to be sceptical about the claims of this company. Firstly about compression. Do you actually think compression is not going to affect the quality of your 720p image? You’ll find that the compression will almost certainly wash out vibrant colours (As actually mentioned by a lot of journalists) and don’t get me started on what compression will do to black areas.
His other comment on ISPs is also very viable. He mentions the fact the ISP caps will effectively allow people to play for a few hours a month. This is FACT. When questioned about this ‘problem’ the OnLive spokes man said that the ISP’s will allow traffic through, and it’s up to them to sort it out.
Now to me, ISP’s aren’t going to welcome this LARGE traffic with open arms. Yes it will happen eventually, because streaming technology is the future, but initially this is a big problem.
ISP connection issues… He’s got another valid point (DSL connections) are shit.
1 millisecond is no lag at all? Okay since I work in Networking, I can tell you that the claims of 1millisecond is bullshit. After looking into this a bit more, the proof is in the way the guy phrased what he said… He said it takes 1millisecond to render the frame server side.. Now playing online games I get about 20-30ms ping. So add that to it, meaning 31-41ms lag. Unless they are going to build a datafarm in my back garden.
March 27, 2009 at 1:12 am
Philip…
Let me work out what you have said starting from the bottom.
Compression and depression through Onlive will take about 2ms. (1ms server side, 1ms on computer). This makes your latency about 22ms-32ms. I don’t really know where you got that extra 9ms but pretty much anything under 80ms is unnoticeable to humans!
Second, if compression only takes 1ms, don’t you think that maybe it isn’t compressed very much? I mean it takes 2-4mbps on average for 720p with Onlive. Other HD streams online that I know of use under 2mbps per second for 720p (For instance ABC). Guano is wrong, however. 720p can definitely be compressed and still be 720p. The only known compression problems that I have heard about is a slightly noticeable smoothness and very slight artifacting. I have heard nothing about color changes, that doesn’t make any sense. When compression takes place, similar information is globbed together, but contrast and color is not changed, unless it is extremely similar to another color.
Also most ISPs have a monthly cap well over 10-15GB. Most are in the range of 60GB to 250GB. One could play around the clock for quite a few days with these monthly caps. Many ISPs do not have caps at all and some only have throttling after a certain amount. Of course, onlive will not be a big problem to the ISPs because their main fear is peer-to-peer users that upload just as much as they download. If ISPs cannot support this many people playing Onlive at THEIR guaranteed speeds then that’s their problem to fix it or change the terms of their plan, which customers are not going to like. This will lead to customers changing to a different provider that is up with the current times, and then you can say goodbye to the company that couldn’t.
March 27, 2009 at 1:14 am
Also, OnLive will not be available to the UK this year or probably in the next several years anyway. Hopefully they will be able to fix the screwed up internet by then in the UK.
March 27, 2009 at 2:47 am
@Landon
“Also most ISPs have a monthly cap well over 10-15GB. Most are in the range of 60GB to 250GB”
In America maybe. But over here most have low cap’s and there is only a few truly unlimited packages out there.
And giving that this is a UK based website, you have to take the fact that we are in the UK when looking at the reasons we chose in this article
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Also it will be a fair few years yet before we get the same standard broadband as Japan or the US, since the current infrustructor is no good enough.
March 28, 2009 at 2:43 am
Ahhh… what gave that I was American away? “color” instead of “colour”? Seemingly oblivious to the UK?
Oh course, I didn’t know about the crappy internet over there, but I can tell you that the internet in the US isn’t even close to Japan. Hopefully Obama will get us caught up to those guys, if he ever fixes the messed up economy.
But hopefully, like I said, internet in the UK will be better by the time OnLive comes rolling through.
March 28, 2009 at 3:38 am
I can accept both Philip and Landon’s comments, I may be wrong about input lag and download caps. This isn’t really a cogent and well thought out response, but I can only hope that OnLive has done their research about the viability of connection speeds, at least in the US. I can’t see a company pouring millions of dollars into a system that can’t possibly work given the infrastructure it relies solely upon. As for the degradation of video quality due to streaming compression, Landon, you may be right and we’ll just have to see how badly it affects the visuals. But, as I stated earlier, the original article asserted that the compression was going to happen in-game, not in transmission and I believe that to be unsupported and unlikely. Thanks to all who responded to my comments, I’m not sure why playstationgameruk hasn’t responded to my comments, but I’d like a reply, given that (s)he has enough time to respond to the other comments. You don’t have to agree with everything I’ve said, but I think my points were reasonable and weren’t merely ad hominem attacks.
March 28, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Yes, I also noticed that the author said that you cannot buy games. This is not the case. You can buy the games and they will be on your account FOREVER. OnLive will not delete any games from their library and if they do, a full refund for those games would be given.
December 24, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Hey. I got a 502 gateway error earlier today when I tried to access this page. Anyone else had the problem?