Remote game services (OnLive, Gaikai, etc.)

I think it would be kind of cool if some of those epic ubergames had extended high quality cut scenes using this. Imagine something like Mass Effect 2 with 100 hours of HD cutscenes, and you only saw a subset of them each time you played due to your decisions.

Even if there's minimal gaming, well written interactive stories would probably do pretty well on the Wii.

 

But far fewer than travel domestically. If you're globe trotting, by all means, hold off until they've got more coverage around the world.

 

The games that are currently featured in the Onlive beta are suprsingly playable. I do notice a little lag, but still you get used to it quickly and it doesn't really distract from the experience. I have Verizon FIOS by the way (15-20mbps). I'm just suprised by how well it works.

I'm actually more interested in Onlive's competitors, Gakai and OTOY. Gaikai is going the route of having publishers using GaiKai's service to host games for people to try/buy/rent. The publishers rent space on GaiKai servers. There is no portal like Onlive. The could be a banner on the publishers website "Play Mirror's Edge" now. You click and you intsnatly start playing in a window. GaiKai is't aiming to replace consoles so don't expect 720p resolution, etc. They are just providing a service for publishers to get their stuff out there. Also, they have plenety of servers around the US so lag shouldn't be a concern. GaiKai has also teamed up with InstantAction to offer games on Facebook

OTOY, on the other hand, is licensing there technology out to publishers. Imagine, if Valve licensed this tech and had all of their games available to play without the hassle of downloading and installing the game as long as you purchased it. They could set up multiple options (stream (play anywhere) /download) and they can control the pricing and availability. I have seen Left4Dead running on OTOY's setup and it looked pretty good. GTA4 was also running on it. As far as Valve is concerned it would be good for business.

 

I'll be keeping an eye out when more information becomes publicy available, but I am quite skeptical. I tried playing a PS3 game (Shooter) running on my PSP (through remote play, on a local Wireless connection directly between PS3 and the PSP) and it was horrid. I'm sure a LAN connection would be worlds better, but then again, living far away from the servers results in lag too.

 

Something I have observed in MW2: people really, really hate lag. Especially those brIts. I don't know how well this service will go over with that sort of crowd.

 

Evidently if you were one of the first 25,000 that pre-registered for OnLive, you'll be getting a surprise. Instead of getting the first 3 months free, now you will be getting the first 12 months free. You also get a coupon for a free game too. Too late to sign up though. The service launches in 17 more days on June 17.

http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/05/30/onlive-pre-registered-users-now-getting-one-year-free/

Tommy McClain

 

I guess nobody is using this yet? It went live yesterday. Guess since it's real nobody can bag on it for being vapor anymore. You will just find something else to bag on for being vapor. LOL

Tommy McClain

 

my friend has this, its unusable on his netbook , his laptop is barely up to speed. Only his desktop is able to runit well with a dual core cpu and 3 gigs of ram.


I'm not going to pass judgment on it, seems very expensive for what it is .

 

You mean like Nvidia's 3D Surround Vision Gaming?

 

yea thats expensive as heck. But at least thats an added cost. Seems to me that you have to pay for the service and pay for the game and if you don't have online acess you can't play at all.

 

I'd really like to see an extensive review and am kinda surprised about the apparent lack of them.
Digitalfoundry in particular could really do it justice but I guess they're kinda busy with E3

 

A good start:
http://gizmodo.com/5567770/onlive-streaming-game-service-tested-at-home-finally

Image quality seems to be horrible. Surprised about apparent lack of lag though.

 

Doesnt seem very attractive to me. So you not only have to pay for a subsciption but also for the games. They say borderlands costs you 30 dollars. For that kind of money you might as well buy the game. Expensive pc hardware isnt really a issue either as for 400 euro's or so you can buy a gpu, cpu, mem and mainboard that will easily run every game out there out atleast decent settings. IQ will certainly be better than what those screenshots show. And than you also don't have to worry about your internet connection, potential lagg, all sorts of different payment schemes per game etc.

 

Whoa, that's either some massive video compression or it's rendering at a very low (320x240? joking) resolution, compressing it, sending it and then upscaling it on the host computer. I'm talking about the 720p non-upscaled screenshot they provided in the article.

Not for me certainly, but someone somewhere probably doesn't mind paying the subscription fee (although free for 1 years if you subscribe NOW) plus rental (3 day, 5 day, unlimited) fee. Unlimited rental fee is basically retail price of the game.

If you were able to "activate" a game you already own so you could play it on the service, it might have a tiny bit of attraction, but with the quality and the way it's structured, no thanks...

Regards,
SB

 

Definitely not for me. It seems that it has changed quite a bit from what its original concept was all about.

 

Well, that's the thing really. For any encoding there is a tradeoff between latency, quality, and bandwidth. I'd have to look it up, but the cable/sat/VOD systems using x264 generally have a latency in the range of .5-2 seconds for encoding. I'm pretty sure that onlive is using x264 in single frame latency mode, which greatly restricts the encoding quality available, esp if you are trying to conserve bandwidth. The main developer of x264 has a post a while back on his blog about the changes required for single frame mode.

 

If Steam offered game rentals then Onlive would pretty much be toast! Btw, why doesn't Steam offer rentals? It seems to me there'd be a lot of demand for rentals, especially for games you're only interested in playing once.

 

I was unable to test OnLive when I was in LA. None of my friends living in the area had fast enough broadband. Hotel topped out at around 3.5mbps and that was saturating the connection as much as I could. Gaikai guys told me that LA infrastructure isn't very good.

I am planning to test it properly though in the next couple of weeks.

Latency is a funny old thing. Consoles have done a good job in getting us accustomed to spongier, less precise controls. It sounds like they've managed to wangle their way around the lag side of things but it wouldn't surprise me if measured latencies look alarmingly high.

When people start comparing image quality to PS2 you have to wonder if they can really market this as an HD service.

 

Thanks in advance, grandmaster, really looking forward to your analysis.