Remote game services (OnLive, Gaikai, etc.)

Your examples prove the point. Who likes sitting in line at a hospital? I used to work in the ER and I can tell you people are none-to-pleasant when they hit a peak period. If they had an alternative they would take it.

Likewise, I live in Seattle. I work early in the day just to avoid the traffic jams that occur here every day at peak period.

So yes, just like roads and hospitals. The difference is a) you are paying for the gaming service as a means of entertainment and b) it would be up against other competition that is already established.

Wrong. It is pretty disastrous when a service (like hosting) is oversold and a hundred or two customers fail to receive their service. If the company stands by their "uptime guarantee" in the least you just lost a months worth of revenue for being down.

And that would be the same scenario OnLive faces--if they oversell the service and peak usage brings the system to a grind they will lose customers exceedingly fast due to the market competition as well as the entire service is tied to the cloud. No cloud, no service. This is a disaster and generates significant negative word of mouth that can be VERY hard to shake.

Anyone who has an Xbox connected to Live knows that answer!

Yeah, that sounds like a great strategy!

 

An option? Now that's funny & scary. ROFL

Tommy McClain

 

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/onlive-pc-launch-this-june

Subscription $15 per month, game prices / rentals not included.

 

Yeesh, a 15 USD a month fee in addtion to rental and purchase prices of games?

Regards,
SB

 

Depends on the actual game prices.

And of course, it also means no hardware purchases are required for your PC (I mean, beyond a certain level that's enough to run the streamed video).

 

$15USD = $180 per year budget to upgrade your machine?

Could you justify a seperate gaming PC on that kind of budget?

 

180 USD a year is more than I spend per year averaged out on upgrading my main PC, except for the video card.

Then again, for the level of graphics that will be provided by Onlive, chances are it'll be equivalent to a <100 USD graphics card anyway, putting it once again within the budget for constantly upgrading the computer with an equal increase in visual quality. After all I doubt this solution will be running games at higher than 720p.

Add to that being unable to adjust visual quality, increased control latency, and possible server outages during load times of a new blockbuster release, and I'm not seeing an attraction here myself.

Then again, for casual pop-cap style games, that's probably all you'd need. I'm highly skeptical that a system that relies on my control input going to a remote server -> processed -> video encoded -> sent back is going to be able to properly reflect very quick movements in an FPS. I usually do 180 turns in less than 100 ms. Which means there's not going to be a lot of leeway for this to be encoding high speed, high action (180 turn won't leave much redundant area's of the screen not needing to be redrawn), with high reaction speed.

But then again, that isn't exactly a casual application. Meh, I still don't see much point in this, but we'll see how it goes.

Regards,
SB

 

That's quite expensive imo.

The only appeal this has for me, is the ability to play PC games on portable devices, but when I'm at home I'll definately want to play natively to get the best experience.

I wonder if they'll allow you to play a game in onLive, if you've purchased a physical copy already...if not that's a deal breaker imo.

 

They could if they can manage to do something like what Steam has worked out with some publishers. Being able to enter in the code of a physical copy, and after which the game would be available on the service. Steam does this with quite a few titles, although unfortunately isn't universal...

Regards,
SB

 

There is a free version of Onlive called Onlive Game Portal. They do seem to go the Gametap\Xbox Live route with this with offering tiers of services. I think it's a smart idea.

I probably won't sign up for a subsciption. But atleast, I can stream demos for free instead of having to pay for a subscription just to do that. Also, having the ability to rent "select" games without having to subscribe is a smart idea as well so people can demo the service.

I do believe that they will gimp the service for non-subscribers such as the bandwidth. You'll probably be playing demos in 480p instead of 720p like subscribers or they will limit demos to certain times of the day.

It also would be smart for them to offer free rentals of older titles to get people to sign up. I like to hear their promotional offerings. I'm more interested now that they announced the Onlive Game Portal.

Source:
http://blog.onlive.com/2010/03/11/more-news-from-onlive/

"So, I’m pleased to announce the OnLive® Game Portal, a companion offering to the OnLive Game Service that I described on my blog yesterday.

The OnLive Game Portal is for gamers looking for direct access to OnLive games without being required to subscribe to the features of the full OnLive Game Service. Through the OnLive Game Portal, gamers will be able to play select games directly on a rental basis as well as game demos for free; subject to available OnLive service capacity and whatever usage limits are associated with each given demo. Rentals will be priced on a per-game basis. There is no service fee for the OnLive Game Portal.
We think this is a great offering for gamers to try out games, or if they prefer, play games they’re interested in for a particular period of time. We also think it’s a great way to get a taste of the OnLive experience to see if they want to join the greater OnLive community on an ongoing basis through the OnLive Game Service.

Of course, like all games in the OnLive Game Service, games in the OnLive Game Portal start instantly, are always updated, and don’t require high-end hardware to play high-performance games. It only takes seconds to install OnLive’s small browser plug-in, and only seconds more before you’re playing a top-tier game. And, of course, OnLive Game Portal games will also play through OnLive’s MicroConsole TV Adapter on an HDTV"

 

well that press release does specifically point out that you can play Onlive Game Portal games on an HDTV so I'm guessing that those rentals or demos would be still be in HD even if you don't have a subscription. My guess is that when it comes to demos, there's going to be some sort of playtime restriction for non-subscribers though.

 

Just to let you know, I'm currently participating in the beta. I can't really say much else for risk of breaking NDA. It does work!

 

The question isn't really whether it works or not but more whether the system lives up to OnLive's claims. Based on what I saw at GDC, frame-rate was extremely inconsistent and talk of GPUs twice as powerful as Xenos cut no mustard when Burnout Paradise is running at around half the frame-rate.

When I asked the OnLive guy at the developer presentation about the dodgy frame-rate, first of all he said his footage at the presentation was captured at 30fps, then when I said that the main Steve Perlman presentation was the same, he blamed the projector!

I expect Xbox 360 to be $150 at E3 - that's ten months of OnLive. It might seem like a bad idea comparing a streaming video service to a console, but that's exactly what Perlman was doing in his Q+A with the press.

 

someguy broke nda and posted a review at shacknews forums, but since then it got deleted. his main points were that the delay is definitely there, and very noticable for fps games, but that it was usable and playable. he said the gun shoots pretty much immediately, but moving around had a bit of lag that you had to get used to. I forget what games he said he played, batman was one of them, he also said the graphics at 720p were crystal clear

 

Being on a constant business trips, living at hotels, medium level business laptop. OnLive should give us some good catalog of multiplayer RTS or turnbased strategy games and may have one new customer. Some of the game genres should work perfectly even if lag is present.

 

So Onlive hasn't delivered their promises of being lag free, running on high graphic settings or running on netbooks since wifi is disabled. So what are people paying for?

That wouldn't work, given they want you to be near their data centers

 

There's no such thing as a lag free game, local or otherwise. They promised a manageable level of input lag that made games playable.

OnLive has 3 data centers that cover like 95% of the continental United States. If you're travelling mostly domestically your biggest problem will probably be the quality of the internet connection at your hotel. I've found the wifi to be spotty a lot of times.

 

A lot of people travel overseas though.