Remote game services (OnLive, Gaikai, etc.)

[sebbbi]

You don't buy the PC game; you buy the OnLive game. If you bought a PC disc, you'd have to buy again to play OnLive to your tablet.

I wonder if they are planning to rent the Office programs as well

The question really becomes: Can you freely install any programs to your remote OnLive Windows desktop (download from the Internet like usually and install using Windows installer), or do they block all installations and force you to buy all the applications from the OnLive store. That would limit a lot, since majority of Windows application developers would not want to develop a special OnLive version of their application (and of course would limit all professional use based on custom applications).

 

[wco81]

How do the OnLive prices compare to prices from other sources, like Steam sales or sales at big box stores?

 

[AlphaWolf]

How do the OnLive prices compare to prices from other sources, like Steam sales or sales at big box stores?

http://www.onlive.com/games/featuredgames

 

[Cheezdoodles]

Hmmm

Remote win 7 desktop for iPad this friday. Comes with ms office!

http://m.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-7-OnLive-Streaming-Microsoft-Office-iPad,14482.html

 

[wco81]

Hmm, $40 for AC Brotherhood, a year old game? I got it for $10 from BB.

 

[patsu]

Yeah, they probably will adjust the price, and prove their business model as they go. It's still very early.

That remote Windows desktop for iPad looks interesting. I might use it once in a while for a quick session and then download + delete my data right away (like those Kinkos pay-per-use PC). Probably won't subscribe to it, or use it for long term serious work. Afraid of malware and other funny business. Who knows what goes on at the server side.

EDIT: If they charge it cheap enough, it may be useful for people whose PCs are hopelessly infested with malware. There are many people out there like this. I could only help a handful of friends and strangers when I have the time.

 

[patsu]

Cloud gaming service Gaikai coming to Facebook http://gamasutra.com/view/news/39681/Cloud_gaming_service_Gaikai_coming_to_Facebook.php

Cloud gaming company Gaikai confirmed today at the Cloud Gaming Europe conference that its online game-streaming service is coming to Facebook.

The move puts streaming video games on a social network that has over 800 million users. Gaikai chief executive David Perry explained that the company is planning to offer demos of high-end gaming titles via Facebook soon, reports GI.biz [registration required].

As part of his talk, Perry also demoed Blizzard's popular MMO World of Warcraft running on the social network.

...

As I understand, the WoW demo is only a tech demo. WoW is not going to FaceBook:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/gaikai-bringing-wow-to-facebook-6348681?tag=newstop;title;1

[UPDATE]: Shortly after the publication of this report, a Gaikai representative provided GameSpot with a statement regarding Perry's presentation. According to the representative, "Gaikai is NOT bringing WoW to Facebook (at least not in the foreseeable future). David Perry forgot to preface the demo by saying it is purely a tech demo, to demonstrate how long the sign-up process for games can be and to show how Gaikai can make it so much faster and simpler for consumers." [Emphasis in original.]

 

[patsu]

Crytek Announces GFACE - Closed Beta Test Open for Applications
http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=969&Itemid=1

Today, Crytek has finally announced GFACE. We now know that it is a cloud-based "social media publishing service" with which you can play free multiplayer games, share videos, watch movies, chat and so on with your friends.

GFACE is powered by realtime cloud-based technology platform titled Seed Engine. It utilizes technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3 and currently works only on Firefox and Chrome web browsers.

A closed Beta test is now open for applications to a limited amount of testers. You can get a taste of how GFACE currently looks and feels by visiting the Beta section here.

 

[patsu]

Although not game related, their newly announced OnLive Desktop service seems really cool...

http://desktop.onlive.com/

Seems primed for a Microsoft acquisition.

Tommy McClain

Microsoft challenging licensing of OnLive's Windows 7 virtualization for iPad
http://www.appleinsider.com/article...nlives_windows_7_virtualization_for_ipad.html

Without ever referencing Apple's iPad by name, Microsoft stated "Some inquiries about these [licensing] scenarios have been raised as a result of recent media coverage related to OnLive’s Desktop and Desktop Plus services." Matz said Microsoft is now "actively engaged with OnLive with the hope of bringing them into a properly licensed scenario, and we are committed to seeing this issue is resolved."

...

The violation Matz alluded to in general terms states that "customers that want to work with partners to have them host Windows 7 in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution on their behalf, can do so when the customer provides the partner licenses through the customer’s own agreements with Microsoft," and that "the hosting hardware must be dedicated to, and for the benefit of the customer, and may not be shared by or with any other customers of that partner."

OnLive's business would appear to only make sense if it were sharing its server hosting services across all of its free or $5 per month subscribers, and iPad users are not suppling their own licenses for Windows 7 to use the service.

Additionally, Matz wrote, "Microsoft partners who host under the Services Provider License Agreement ('SPLA') may bring some desktop-like functionality as a service by using Windows Server and Remote Desktop Services.

"Under this solution, the partner is free to offer this service to any customer they choose, whether or not they have a direct licensing agreement with Microsoft. However, it is important to note that SPLA does not support delivery of Windows 7 as a hosted client or provide the ability to access Office as a service through Windows 7. Office may only be provided as a service if it is hosted on Windows Server and Remote Desktop Services."

...

 

[patsu]

Gaikai has been pretty active in GDC and recent weeks too:

Gaikai takes Warner MMOGs to the cloud
http://www.edge-online.com/news/gaikai-takes-warner-mmogs-cloud

Gaikai has announced a deal with Warner Bros that will make two of the publisher's MMOGs playable instantly, streamed from the cloud, in web browsers.

The Lord Of The Rings Online is available to North American players now, with Turbine's Dungeons & Dragons Online to follow soon. Players can launch the full, free-to-play version of both titles from the games' official websites.

...

Game signs Gaikai deal
http://www.edge-online.com/news/game-signs-gaikai-deal

Ailing UK retailer Game Group has penned a deal with cloud gaming service Gaikai.

The deal will see Game offer playable demos on its online store, and brings the company in-line with other retailers such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

...

David Perry on Gaikai and LG
http://www.edge-online.com/features/david-perry-gaikai-and-lg

we look at what cloud gaming company Gaikai's Smart TV deal with technology manufacturer LG means for the future of gaming ...

 

[djdev]

Gaikai vs OnLive: Digital Foundry article

For those interested, Digital Foundry did a comparison article for 2 cloud gaming services: OnLive and Gaikai. They both have different business models. OnLive is more like a retailer and Gaikai is utilized by publishers but will be allowing full game streaming soon.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-off-gaikai-vs-onlive

Graphics settings/Image quality: Gaikai is the clear winner due to maxed out graphics settings

One of the most compelling arguments in favour of cloud gaming is that hardware is upgraded server-side, potentially allowing for better-than-consoles visuals. Right now, only Gaikai is really delivering in terms of high-end visuals.

OnLive is running games on low settings. Only plackpack titles can be maxed out.

We came away disappointed with OnLive in this regard when we first looked at the service, and in the here and now, nothing much has really changed. Far from delivering high-end, console-beating experiences, we are treated to a mixture of downgraded visuals with higher than console frame-rates.
In order to maintain the target 60FPS as closely as possible, graphics settings are dialled back to a standard that is in some cases visibly worse than what we are seeing on the current consoles. In previous analyses, we deduced that OnLive servers most likely use dual core CPUs combined with something along the lines of an NVIDIA 9800GT or 9800GTX. These conclusions were based on matching graphics between the cloud service and the original PC game, then measuring performance. As OnLive blocks off graphics settings menus, it was the only way we could compare.

Gaikai is running games at max setting, which can be adjustable.

Interestingly, Gaikai takes a different approach in allowing the user to tweak the video settings in some titles, while also providing an upper-end baseline for games where the user is unable to make any changes in this area. A look at the display settings menu in From Dust hosted on Gaikai reveals that an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560Ti is used in the terminals to run the game, while the refresh rate is set up to allow for a 60FPS update - a Core i5 and GTX 560ti combo would be enough to run all of the titles featured on Gaikai at 60Hz, most of them at 1080p.....
In all of the games we've tried the graphics settings are generally set to maximum (or thereabouts), with high levels of texture filtering present and with 8x multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) enabled. The batch of screenshots below give you a good idea of just how much of a visual upgrade you are getting over what is routinely available in OnLive, and on current console hardware

Framerate and Performance: OnLive is the winner due to encoding video at 60FPS.

OnLive's most obvious advantage is temporal resolution - it aims for 60FPS on our comparison games and does a decent enough job of maintaining it, while Gaikai offers an inconsistent update closer to 30FPS.

OnLive is smoother since the video is encoded at 60FPS.

Running at 60FPS, the action is smoother with OnLive and the visible judder that is present with the game on Gaikai is completely absent. Even when OnLive does drop frames, it's far less noticeable compared to its rival. What we describe as a 'perceptual' 60FPS is in play here, where the dips in performance are so small that they can go unnoticed by the player when engrossed in gameplay.

Gaikai is less smooth and framerate dips are much more noticable due to lower video encoding rate. However, Gaikai mentions running their games at 60FPS in the datacenter in many articles. http://www.edge-online.com/news/gaikais-perry-cloud-latency-not-concern

Compression Quality: Gaikai is the clear winner. Gaikai is using x264 software compression and OnLive is using a custom hardware encoder although both are rendering h.256 video.

In terms of video quality, Gaikai's advantage is clear. While OnLive often looks muddy, blurry and is filled with heavy compression artifacts during the general run of play, video quality is much more solid with Gaikai - in fast-paced scenes with lots of complex scenery, detail is maintained, and despite there being some visible artifacts on show at times, we really get the impression that we are looking at something closer to a native high definition presentation.

Gaikai seems to encode the game at a lower framerate in order to allow more video bandwidth for a boost in video quality. However, Gaikai did state that they were running games at 60FPS in the datacenter (http://www.edge-online.com/news/gaikais-perry-cloud-latency-not-concern). Also, Gaikai can use more bandwidth than OnLive however, it does hover around 5mbps on average from my personal test.

On the other hand, Gaikai appears to aim for a more manageable 30FPS, seemingly relying on the use of more local datacentres to keep the level of input lag in check. Our theory is that the games themselves may actually be running at 60FPS server-side with Gaikai, but with the video encoder not encoding every frame generated, giving a lower frame-rate client-side.

Basically, fewer unique frames means less work for the compressor to deal with when encoding the video stream. From another perspective, dropping down to 30FPS also provides double the amount of bandwidth for image quality and thus delivers overall clarity closer to the experience of gaming on local hardware.

Latency: Gaikai is the overall winner due to the varied location of their datacenters. However, there are some cases where OnLive can match the latency of Gaikai. Although, Gaikai was actually able to match console latency in some test concerning Bulletstorm (133ms).

Higher frame-rates should give OnLive a clear latency advantage over Gaikai, but testing demonstrates that this is not the case. Gaikai's more local datacentres offer the service an important advantage over its rival

AC Brotherhood
OnLive: 183ms, 183ms, 183ms Gaikai: 167ms, 183ms, 167ms

AC Brotherhood (under load)
OnLive:200ms, 183ms, 200ms Gaikai: 216ms, 167ms, 216ms

Orcs Must Die
OnLive: 283ms, 250ms, 283ms Gaikai: 183ms, 183ms, 183ms

Orcs Must Die (under load)
OnLive: 283ms, 300ms, 283ms Gaikai: 183ms, 183ms, 183ms

The results are rather interesting. Not only does the amount of latency present in some of the titles running on Gaikai equal that of OnLive, but there are also times where controller response is significantly faster despite the frame-rate being lower due to the 30FPS video encode. Taking a closer look at Assassin's Creed on Gaikai reveals that when the frame-rate is consistently hitting the target, the level of latency hovers around the 167ms to 183ms mark - it's playable, but inconsistent. With the game running flat-out at 60FPS, OnLive is more consistent, if slightly slower than Gaikai. When performance drops, both platforms are impacted, but it's Gaikai that seems to suffer the most.

On the other hand, when looking at Orcs Must Die we get far better latency results and as such a completely different feeling of controller response. With Gaikai, baseline latency isn't exactly wonderful at 183ms, but we found it to be consistent and it was possible to adjust to the gameplay experience. Gaikai annihilated OnLive in terms of response here with a consistent 83ms-100ms advantage - remarkable.

Other tests were equally polarising when it came to seeing how well Gaikai fared when put up against games running on the Xbox 360 and natively on PC. Sometimes we got some incredibly good results: playing Bulletstorm, we found controller response to be slightly slower than the 360 game, but sometimes it hit parity - a truly remarkable achievement. The quickest response time we measured was 133ms (identical to Bulletstorm 360) but it could drift to 150ms, in-line with The Darkness 2 on the 360 or Killzone 2 on PS3 - and we also recorded the odd 166ms measurement too. A matter of 17 or 33ms in additional lag might seem miniscule but you can definitely feel it in the inconsistency of the response.

Overall, I would have to go with Gaikai for this Face-Off. However, both services can't beat the local PC experience.

Steve Perlman's group takes honours for frame-rate, while David Perry's team command clear advantages in game spec, video encoding and overall latency. The signs are there that this can work: Bulletstorm on Gaikai running with the same latency as the Xbox 360 game - however inconsistent it may be - is as clear an indicator as any that cloud could evolve into a viable contender. The technology here is achieving miracles as is, and with advances in infrastructure and improved engineering, it's only going to get better.

TLR: Gaikai is running games at max settings (which are adjustable)and has better latency than OnLive. However, OnLive has a much more stable framerate since they are encoding the video at 60 fps. OnLive has been running certain Playpass games on low settings like Assasins Creed. Also, OnLive has recently been in the habit of launching games at lower graphics settings than increasing them months after launch. I beleive this has to do with server capacity issues. This has happened with Batman Arhkam City and Saints Row The third. However, users can adjust graphics settings in Playpack subscription games.

 

[wco81]

But what are the business models of the 2 services?

Onlive seems to work on lower-end hardware, requires subscription and purchases of certain games at full retail prices?

Gaikai requires better hardware, requires subscription and full retail price for games?

 

[djdev]

But what are the business models of the 2 services?

Onlive seems to work on lower-end hardware, requires subscription and purchases of certain games at full retail prices?

Gaikai requires better hardware, requires subscription and full retail price for games?

Here's a detailed explanation taken from this thread:
http://onlivefans.com/showthread.ph...sons-debates-tech-discussion-and-such-IN-HERE


Onlive:

For consumers, they are primarily a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company selling games and offering demos directly to the consumer. OnLive doesn't require a subscription. There is an optional subscription for back catalog games. OnLive offers free 30 minute demos for the majority of their titles. However, the are now partly an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)/Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company due to their OnLive desktop Service.

They are working on getting their OnLive client integrated with HDTVs, tablets, smartphones, bluray players, etc in addition to the PC/Mac. We have not heard about the OnLive client coming to Linux (for those who care).

For publishers, OnLive is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company. They allow hosting of games for demo and sale. They also get ad revenue from publishers when users play demos. OnLive gets around a 30 percent profit from direct sales to consumers. They also have created instant demo, probably in response to Gaikai, which launch directly into games. It seems that Onlive does not share ad revenue, and they do not have affiliate sites to host links to their instant demos. OnLive offers a SDK to enable various features. However, some games have been ported without the SDK.


- Centralized gaming platform to compete with other distribution platforms (consoles/steam/d2d)
- Community based
- Aimed for consumers

Gaikai:

For consumers, they do not offer any services directly. They just deliver technology that enables users to play games through the cloud. Gaikai is not a centralized platform for consumers, and you cannot buy games directly from Gaikai. They are working on getting Gaikai-enabled games working on HDTVs, tablets, smartphones, etc (basically anything that has a web brower or streams video) in addtional to PC/Mac/Linux. Consumers are able to play demos powered by Gaikai embedded on many sites such as www.gaikai.com/games and www.eurogamer.net/gaikai

For publishers, Gaikai is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company with an advertising slant. They allow publishers/developers to host games for demo and for sale (requires private cloud hosting). However, they do not get profit from the sale. That profit goes directly to publishers/developers/retailers. They primarily get profit from ad revenue from publishers when users play demos and the cost of hosting private clouds (which facilitates full game streaming and free2play games) for developers/publishers. Gaikai shares ad revenue with affiliate sites that host links to their instant demos. Gaikai offers a SDK to enable various features like touch controls, etc. However, they emphasize that all games can been ported with no effort from developers/publishers.

They allow publishers/developers to host full games and free to play games by creating private clouds, which can integrate into the publishers/developers storefront. Gaikai does offer payment services if the publisher/developer wishes to use them. Gaikai does not take a cut of sales.

For retailers, Gaikai is like an advertisement company that can supply demos and redirect users back to the retailer site for final sale. Obviously, Gaikai will also generate ad revenue from the retailer as well. Also, Gaikai will allow full game streaming on retail sites very soon after they launch a portal on Facebook. The retailer will have to pay for the number of permanent instances needed to host the full streaming games.

For gaming websites/affiliates, Gaikai will share ad revenue (50/50) for Gakai enabled game demos users play on your site. All you need to do is add a snippet of code to your website to enable Gaikai demos.

- Alternative distribution system for publishers for demos or full games
- You will not be purchasing or demoing games from Gaikai, you will purchase them from the game developer's (or publisher's) website
- Not a centralized platform like Onlive (you will need to visit each publisher's site to use their streaming version of the game)
- Not a product for consumers. It is a product -only- for game studios to purchase and utilize. Regular customers will never have access.
- Not intended to compete with any current gaming platforms (consoles/steam/d2d/etc) It's simply another way publishers and developers can get their game out there on their own.
- Partly ad driven with profits going to both Gaikai and the affliiate websites (Eurogamer, Escapist) that host links to Gaikai enabled demos

 

[Rangers]

Hmm, I'm not even sure how console related this discussion is anymore, but anyway,

http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/15/3022233/nvidia-geforce-grid-gtc-2012

Nvidia announces GeForce Grid: cloud gaming direct from a GPU, with games by Gaikai (update: video)

Nvidia just finishing telling us about how it's going to stick a Kepler GPU in the cloud: now, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is telling us how it will use distributed graphics to stream low-latency video games from the internet to computers that don't have one themselves. Nvidia's partnered with cloud gaming provider Gaikai, and claims that the GeForce Grid GPU has reduced latency of streaming games to just ten milliseconds by capturing and encoding game frames rapidly, and in a single pass, and promises that the enhanced Gaikai service will be available on TVs, tablets and smartphones running Android and iOS.

Following the presentation, Jen-Hsun Huang was able to provide a little more detail on how exactly GeForce Grid works, in response to a question by PC Perspective:

Where we used to render from frame buffer and copy to the CPU for compression and streaming, here it's already streaming right out of the GPU, saving encode time, not to mention copy time. Compressing and streaming in parallel... we've taken maybe a couple hundred milliseconds of lag, and reduced it to something that's the same performance and snappiness as a game console.

Nothing special is needed at the client-end, just a standard H.264 hardware video decoder. Anything that can play YouTube can run GeForce Grid-streamed games, Huang told us. He did say hat there's still optimizations possible at the client end to further reduce latency, though, but wouldn't confirm whether Nvidia or partners were working on a Geforce Grid-specific client for the task.

Most notably

Sounds really pretty damn dangerous to consoles if they can ever get the encodes to not look like shit.

Sounds like they've trumped Onlive in significant ways though. NO dedicated hardware (other than 264 decoder) is pretty huge itself, and the less lag also.

 

[TheD]

I see nvidia is back to its old habit of lying like crazy.

That graph only shows geforce grid winning over consoles due to it having half the game logic time (e.g 60FPS vs 30FPS), it is unlikely that it will run all games at 60FPS (and lets not forget that not all console games are 30FPS).

Somehow the "cloud gen 1" has twice the network latency of geforce grid, bar the fact it has nothing to do with nvidia and everything to do with how far away you are.

They even go as far as to claim that the decoding takes longer on "cloud gen 1" than geforce grid

 

[babybumb]

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/geforce-grid/

Consoles have the most straightforward pipeline. Most console games run at 30 frames per second (fps). This equates to 33 ms per frame. Because three frames are buffered, this adds up to about 100 ms of latency for the rendering portion. HDMI TV displays add 66 ms of additional latency. In total, it takes about 166 ms between a command being issued and the picture updated on the screen.

The latency of cloud-based solutions includes all of the above plus three additional stages. When a frame is rendered on a cloud server, it must be encoded (like a video), sent across the network, and then decoded on the client. These processes take up approximately 30 ms, 75 ms, and 15 ms respectively, adding 120 ms to the pipeline. This extra latency is the main reason why first-generation cloud gaming feels laggy when compared to gaming on a local system.

GeForce GRID reduces the latency of cloud gaming by reducing every aspect of the rendering and transmission pipeline. First, it reduces the render time from 100 ms to 50 ms. This is achieved by increasing the framerate from 30 fps to 60 fps. The benefit here is twofold; not only do gamers get reduced latency, they also get higher frame rates. The result is greatly improved perceived smoothness and responsiveness.

Second, the encoding and decoding time has been reduced thanks to a host of new hardware and software technologies. NVIDIA GeForce GRID’s NVENC (low-latency encoder), NVFBC (ultra-fast full-frame buffer capture), and NVIFR (ultra-fast frame read back) capabilities capture, scale, and encode a game frame in a single pass in about 15 ms, shaving 30 ms off the overall latency.

Finally, the network latency will be much lower with GeForce GRID. First-generation cloud gaming servers used a single GPU per server. GeForce GRID servers enable up to four power-efficient Kepler graphics processing units (GPUs) to be connected to each server. This means much more powerful servers, lower cost for the operator, and much wider deployment. For the same cost, operators can deploy servers in a greater number of locations, which brings down the network latency, especially if you do not currently live near a data center.

 

[3dcgi]

So network latency is reduced because there will be more data centers.

 

[Acert93]

Hmmm confirmation NV not in a next gen console? Get locked out of consoles => market the competition

 

[babybumb]

So network latency is reduced because there will be more data centers.

And? Firms like Akamai have hundreds of thousands of servers on almost every ISPs on the planet. With GPU virtualization you can use the hardware much better and bring costs down.

 

[-tkf-]

And? Firms like Akamai have hundreds of thousands of servers on almost every ISPs on the planet. With GPU virtualization you can use the hardware much better and bring costs down.

Virtual GPU? How does this work, you throw a bunch of GPU's in a server and let it rip through 100 of simultanous games running at the same time?

Considering that you need a 680 to run some games at a constant 60hz in HD that is going to either be low quality graphics or alot of GPU's.