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New Service Aims To Replace Consoles With Cloud Gaming
Posted by
Soulskill
on Tue Mar 24, 2009 08:05 AM
from the who-needs-new-hardware-anyway dept.
from the who-needs-new-hardware-anyway dept.
ThinSkin writes "Imagine playing bleeding-edge games, yet never again upgrading your hardware. That's the ambitious goal of OnLive's Internet delivered gaming service. Using cloud computing, OnLive's goal is to 'make all modern games playable on any system,' thanks in large part to OnLive's remote servers that do all the heavy lifting. With a fast enough Internet connection, gamers can effectively stream and play games using a PC, Mac, or a 'MicroConsole,' 'a dedicated gaming client provided by OnLive that includes a game controller.' Without ever having to worry about costly hardware upgrades or the cost of a next-gen console, gamers can expect to fork over about $50 yearly just for the service. If this thing takes off, this can spell trouble for gaming consoles down the road, especially if already-established services like Steam and Impulse join the fray."
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Game Companies Face Hard Economic Choices 511 comments
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the proliferation of free or low-cost games on the Web and for phones limits how high the major game publishers can set prices, so makers are sometimes unable to charge enough to cover the cost of producing titles. The cost of making a game for the previous generation of machines was about $10 million, not including marketing. The cost of a game for the latest consoles is over twice that — $25 million is typical, and it can be much more. Reggie Fils-Aime, chief marketing officer for Nintendo of America, says publishers of games for its Wii console need to sell one million units of a game to turn a profit, but the majority of games, analysts said, sell no more than 150,000 copies. Developers would like to raise prices to cover development costs, but Mike McGarvey, former chief executive of Eidos and now an executive with OnLive, says that consumers have been looking at console games and saying, 'This is too expensive and there are too many choices.' Since makers cannot charge enough or sell enough games to cover the cost of producing most titles, video game makers have to hope for a blockbuster. 'The model as it exists is dying,' says McGarvey."
As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud. Of course, many doubt that such a task can be accomplished in a way that doesn't severely degrade gameplay, but it now appears that Sony is working on something similar as well.
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Ubisoft CEO Says Next Gen Consoles Closer Than We Think 326 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot tells CNBC that he believes the next generation of video game systems isn't as far away as the public has been led to believe. Guillemot noted that public demand for the best machine possible, as well as coming competition from companies such as OnLive could spur Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to roll out new systems sooner than they want. That's not good news for publishers, though, as he says games in the next generation will likely cost $60 million to create."
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Dave Perry Shows Off Cloud Gaming Service "Gaikai" 79 comments
jasoncart writes "Veteran gaming man Dave Perry has shown off his OnLive-rivalling, cloud gaming service called Gaikai in a new video that is drawing a lot of attention. As you can see from the video, Perry plays World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Mario Kart 64, Spore and more — all running on a bog-standard computer through the Gaikai website, itself running in a normal version of Firefox."
More details about the service are available at Perry's website. He spoke about Gaikai in an interview a few months ago, and he seems confident that this will work better than OnLive (which we've discussed in the past).
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OnLive Begins Beta Testing 80 comments
Steve Perlman, CEO of OnLive, has announced that beta testing is now underway for the cloud gaming service that aims to take the processing burden for cutting-edge games off a player's computer and use remote servers instead. Reaction to this service and competitor GaiKai has been interest tempered with skepticism, but users can now sign up to test it themselves and see if the reality matches the hype. There will be hardware and connectivity restrictions to start: "When you sign up for OnLive Beta, you tell us some general information about your ISP, your computer configuration and your location. We use this information to organize Beta testers into test groups so that our engineering team can focus at different times on testing different situations. If you are a potential fit for a particular test group, we'll send you an invitation email, asking you to run a detailed Performance Test on your network connection and your computer configuration."
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OnLive CEO Provides Details On Cloud Gaming 136 comments
eldavojohn writes "OnLive is a new cloud gaming service that is in beta testing. While it might sound like nothing more than corporate buzzwords creeping over into the gaming world, a new video reveals how the CEO claims his service will work. Perlman explains OnLive's solution to the video game compression problem and talks about the '80 ms latency budget.' It's pretty interesting to listen to him figure out this budget and where the 'costs' come from. (Video only.) Now, this all hinges on the 'microconsole,' which — as he reveals at the beginning of the video — is so cheap they plan to give it away. We may also see it incorporated with TVs and other electronic devices. He goes on to talk about perceptual science and dealing with packet irregularities on the internet."
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OnLive Gaming Service Gets Lukewarm Approval 198 comments
Vigile writes "When the OnLive cloud-based gaming service was first announced back in March of 2009, it was met with equal parts excitement and controversy. While the idea of playing games on just about any kind of hardware thanks to remote rendering and streaming video was interesting, the larger issue remained of how OnLive planned to solve the latency problem. With the closed beta currently underway, PC Perspective put the OnLive gaming service to the test by comparing the user experiences of the OnLive-based games to the experiences with the same locally installed titles. The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not."
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Caps (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all fun and games (no pun intended) until you've been playing for a couple of hours and used up the whole of your monthly bandwidth allowance.
I know that some people have the option of truely unlimited service, but an awful lot don't and that puts this service out of their reach.
Re:Caps (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all fun and games (no pun intended) until you've been playing for a couple of hours and used up the whole of your monthly bandwidth allowance.
Or if you have your video games set up at a family party, away from the Internet entirely, and you don't think an air card or a tetherable data plan is worth $720 per year.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I'd be surprised if it got to that point. More likely it'll fail before it gets rolled out. I'm guessing vaporware.
But as far as that goes, I doubt that it's going to take that much more bandwidth than realtime HD streaming. Or in other words, depending upon how much gaming you do it may or may not be an issue.
Re:Caps (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm.
Anyone else reminded of The Phantom [wikipedia.org]?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If The Phantom had made it to market (maybe it did, but I know I never saw one outside of a magazine mockup), this is exactly what would have killed it. Such a console just wouldn't survive in a country where ISPs use download caps - or in the case of many ISPs in Australia, "usage caps" or "data allowances" which include uploads.
Re:Caps (Score:5, Interesting)
No manner of compression will make up for the attempt to do this live. I think a 50MB/above connection might be realistic to keep things smooth, especially in high action scenes with lots of pixels changing every single frame.
I could see: part of things being handled client side and part on the server side but then we just head back to online gaming.
However, even a fiber optics line I'd have my doubts. That is, unless you want to play on a 640x480 screen all day or assume that your internet provider wouldn't packet shape this stuff down to a crawl below VOIP, as someone said a few replies down.
Where I could see this working is in a LAN environment, make some kind of "xbox360server" to host all the games as basically virtual machines across a lan, etc. However, that obviously isn't cloud in the same sense.
Parent
Re:Caps (Score:4, Informative)
You seem to be assuming that this service will stream VIDEO to your unit, but with TFA not being too clear on the subject, my guess is that they will stream just 'polygons' to their 'netconsole', which then displays them as video frames. The bandwith needed should be far smaller.
The biggest difference with mmorpgs is that mmorpg servers send program data to the client, who then does most of the calculations -the hard work- and displays the results.
Also, many slashdotters seem to assume that mmorpgs require a huge bandwith. I think that's wrong. As a well known example WoW was quite playable using a 512 Kb DSL connection.
As other posters have said before, the biggest problem with On-Live's approach is the lag, which is inherent to the Internets, and will continue so for the foreseeable future. Most mmorpg clients use lots of code and processing power just to minimize the effects of lag in the gameplay, with mixed fortunes (Go to Dalaran and ask anyone :)
Parent
READ TEH ARTICLES MUCH?? (Score:4, Informative)
You seem to be assuming that this service will stream VIDEO to your unit, but with TFA not being too clear on the subject
Actually, the article is quite clear:
The secret sauce to making OnLive work is its proprietary, on-the-fly video compression capability. As you're playing the game, the outgoing frame buffers are compressed as a video stream and sent to your local client. Perlman estimates that servers need to be within 1,000 miles of a client, at a maximum, to maintain latencies low enough to ensure playability. User data, such as inputs and commands, will be sent back over the Internet, but those usually consist of fairly small data packets.
Of course, a broadband connection is required. For standard definition (480p) resolutions, users will need a minimum of 1.5 megabits/sec. A 5 megabits/sec connection will support high definition (720P or 1080i) connections. Initially, the service won't support 1080p or higher resolutions, but that may come later.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Awesome. So you need a connection that's faster than what most people have to play games at lower resolution than most PC gamers (and many console gamers) do. Sounds like a winner.
Oh yeah, and it'll blow my bandwidth cap in about forty hours.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Caps (Score:5, Informative)
However, even a fiber optics line I'd have my doubts.
Doing some quick calculations:
The highest number I've gotten for Blu-Ray maximum bandwidth is 54 megabits per second. I've seen torrents much smaller that still looked good.
Assuming uncapped, that's actually doable. Fiber is typically 100 mbits per second, and I'm sure some places offer gigabit.
However, encoding time is on the order of hours or days, and is certainly not live. So the real problem is latency -- take 50 ms from your LCD monitor, plus whatever a wireless controller ads, plus the latency between you and their servers, plus the lag for them to render, capture, and encode, then decode back at the client... that's easily getting up to 200 ms, which I'd consider unplayable.
Also, unless the $50/year includes games, it makes little economic sense, either. These systems are designed to last some four years or so. A Wii can be had for $160, according to a quick Google; this would be $200. A Wii can work when your Internet is down, or when your internet is not fiber. And a Wii actually has games already -- not as many as its competitors, but some.
Where I could see this working is in a LAN environment
Not really. LANs are typically 100 mbits, or if you're willing to spend money on a good switch, gigabit. Same situation as fiber.
The only advantage of a LAN is, with a good switch, you aren't using everyone else's bandwidth, but if you're proposing this:
make some kind of "xbox360server" to host all the games as basically virtual machines across a lan,
That's still likely to be a single port, which means now everyone on the LAN is limited to a combined 100 mbits for their video. It means the concept of a LAN party just got very, very impractical.
And WTF would be the point, if it's a console anyway? In what way is that "xbox360server" better than a real Xbox 360?
As for their "no piracy" claim, as a consumer, that doesn't make me want to sign up for the service. That makes me want to go far away, into the open arms of indie developers, who typically ship with reduced or no DRM.
Parent
Re:Caps (Score:4, Insightful)
Fiber is 100mbits where? Japan? Last I heard of promises were 50mbits, and that even that was the language of "up to" not "actual/realistic". Bluray will truly use 50 megabits a second, not "up to 50". Difference there. so I agree, uncapped. However, how often have you heard of an uncapped connection? We've had capped connections longer than the issues of packet shaping. Certainly not getting better.
Lans' are 100megabits? Wha? You can buy an 8 port gig switch for 40 bucks (25 AR). [newegg.com]
Meanwhile, I do agree with the rest of what you said. There is no real improvement here in general, I'm just saying being able to play all the games off a local network with only one host would be nice for consoles which aren't really friendly to that idea right now. Mostly because they're more locked down than any other DRM that exists. It's "you want to play more than 4 people/more than one game at once, you need more consoles".
The no piracy claim tells me that this is vaporware, really. Cloud computing as a whole is vaporware and it's own form of not so subtle DRM, remote VM's are not.
Parent
AWS, Azure (Score:3, Interesting)
Amazon Web Services [amazon.com] and Windows Azure [microsoft.com] beg to differ.
Re:Caps (Score:5, Insightful)
Also worth mentioning: Even assuming you've got a magical encoding machine which only adds a few milliseconds to the latency, there's the simple fact that most video streamed over the Internet is done through a relatively large buffer.
In fact, Flash audio and video (Youtube and friends) seems to just download as much of the video as it can, as fast as it can, and start playing once it thinks it has enough.
This means it's possible for your connection to drop out completely for a second, or just vary by the amounts Internet traffic typically does, and so long as it comes back in time, your video will just keep playing.
This applies even to most sane "live" broadcasts.
Trying to do it actually live, within a few milliseconds, is completely different. The slightest blip in connectivity, which a sufficiently buffered stream would skip right over, is going to be catastrophic here.
And just in case it wasn't obvious: Buffers inherently add latency, proportional to their size. Add a buffer that can handle even half a second of connection trouble, and you've just added half a second between the time the player says "turn left", and the time they see the camera turn left.
I mention all of this because I suspect that the reason you'd think this is a good idea is, you've got a Roku, or you've used YouTube, or even Skype, and you've concluded that the Internet is now fast enough to do video. Maybe, but I don't think it's fast enough to do the kind of high quality, live, low-latency video demanded by a gamer.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well from reading TFA(I know, I know, but I got bored) they are talking "Wii level" graphics for everyone that don't have the pipe from hell. But even worse than the caps(where I live it is a lousy 36GB per month) I think the congestion would frankly cause this thing to bring a network to its knees. I mean, can you imagine what just a couple of dozen gamers using this thing during primetime would suck down the pipe? And of course once they started dragging everyone to a crawl the traffic shaping would get c
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
May as well reply here.
Am I the only one that actually enjoys owning hardware? I like my PS3. I like my N64. I like my Atari. I like being able to sit down in the "man cave" and play games on my large tv without having to plug in a computer to it (other than the PS3) and if I want to pause or scratch my nuts or whatever, I can.
I have FiOS at the house as well, so it's not like this would be a bad thing bandwidth-wise, but still. No thank you.
Re:Caps (Score:4, Funny)
It's true. With cloud computing, everyone will be able to see you scratch your nuts.
Parent
My predictions (Score:2, Insightful)
The 'microconsole' will be hacked to have GNU/Linux and other FLOSS OSs installed within the first few weeks. Hardware geeks everywhere the device is offered sign up for a gaming service only to hack the subsidized hardware and then drop the subscription as soon as legally feasable. ...like every other time someone thought to subsidize commodity PC hardware (or something based upon it) with a subscription model.
Article also talks about "no piracy because it's not running locally."
That's cute, I suppose late
Re:My predictions (Score:4, Informative)
It sounds like the device would be a thin client. No local storage and little processing other than graphics, maybe not even local 3D rendering. The device can probably be so cheap that they wouldn't mind the small percentage of loss to hackers. At $50/year they're really charging for the servers and service much more than the client hardware.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess the console will be rather low-end (and not have much in the way of mass storage), so it won't be all that attractive as replacement for a "real" computer. OTOH, it is probably cheap to make and has all the connectors required for a thin client in an office environment. So if the manufacturer sells the MicroConsole separately, that might be an interesting "alternative use".
No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of normal online game lag, you have lag between you actually pressing a button and the game responding at the server.
Even a tiny amount in this situation would make the game 'feel' unresponsive.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Instead of normal online game lag, you have lag between you actually pressing a button and the game responding at the server.
Not necessarily. A LOT of lcd computer monitors have 'input lag' of say 50ms (meaning the computer sends the image to the monitor but you don't see it for 50ms after that) whereas lcd tvs don't, and few people complain. Presumably if the game servers are co-located with the ISP you could get lag much smaller than that.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a huge difference between a FPS and an MMO. There are a large chunk of gamers who didn't use wireless mice for a long time because of the input lag. There are those that still refuse to use some of these laggy LCDs for the same reason. You have to "play" the game before you can see it happen.
I remember being able to run through a Unreal tournament match and hit off head shots of moving targets because I could respond in a split second and had precise control. I was not able to reproduce that whe
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Unless the game you're playing trusts the client to do its own hit detection (which would preclude any competitive Internet play), it's the server that disagreed over whether you hit the person, not their client. (although it's possible that some artifacts are produced due to lag compensation)
The only game that I'm aware of that doesn't do server side hit detection is bzFlag, where each client checks for hits against itself which would make cheating trivial, even if the source code wasn't already available.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So really I don't see lag as a real objection to this. I don't see bandwidth as a huge problem going forward either... lots of people already have fiber going to their house these days.
For those people who have ADSL, fibre or even cable can you answer the following:
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You're a victim of the marketing. There's a difference between "how fast a pixel can flip" and "how long it takes to START flipping after the computer tells it to". 2ms response time means no ghosting. It doesn't mean the LCD processing won't take over 50ms to actually propagate the change to the screen. In fact, very often, these low pixel response times are achieved using driving tricks and heavy preprocessing, which ADD lag by buffering more input frames.
Long ago, the complaint was ghosting and blurrines
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't sound as stupid to me. Obviously this wouldn't work well for something like an fps, but for something like an rpg, a casual game, a turn based game, some rts's? It would work fine. Secondly there is hardly any upfront cost. Essentially the hardware on your end would be 40 bucks including the controller. That is an amazingly low barrier to entry, considering you might have access to dozens or hundreds of games right off the bat. There will also never be any issues of backwards compatibility, every game will be playable for as long as the company feels like supporting it. There's no cheating, no red rings of death. The only real barrier right now is bandwidth, but for how long?
I've been predicting this would happen eventually, much to the derision of others, but I didn't expect to see plans for another five years maybe.
Parent
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
every game will be playable for as long as the company feels like supporting it.
You say this like it's a good thing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a problem in my book. Once I have purchased a console, it's mine forever, and the games I purchased to go with it are mine forever too. My copy of Super Mario Bros. on the NES won't stop working just because Nintendo has decided they don't want to support the game any more.
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Informative)
I think Amazon sells crowbars to remove your foot from your mouth.
Parent
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Funny)
"I think Amazon sells crowbars to remove your foot from your mouth."
Parent
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Funny)
It says the server will do the lifting to a thin client. The server is not just streaming binaries to be rendered on the client, the server is receiving input from and return video to be displayed on the client.
A game console with all the responsiveness and graphical horsepower of an X11 terminal? How can it fail!!!
This is really bad news for Nintendo.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Image bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How does cloud computing solve the CPU-GPU bandwidth issues of modern games? Gamers still want to see the game, and at ultra high rez & IQ.
You mean like the Nintendo Wii?
Three problems: lag, lag and lag (Score:3, Informative)
And yet, many big name companies are able to stream HD quality video over the internet
Sure - because they buffer the content on your end, and you don't notice the lag between frame sent and frame displayed. Additionally, the content is pre-rendered. Netflix's "Instant" option sure looks instant to me, because when I click "play" I overlook the few seconds of buffer loading while I settle into a comfy chair, and that's not even considering the additional delay of render time.
It's not a matter of getting HD i
No No No! (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet gaming is often subject to ISP drop-outs and traffic shaping. Why would I willingly embrace single-player gaming in the same poor environment?
Re:No No No! (Score:4, Interesting)
In other words this is RENTAL gaming, not ownership gaming. I prefer to own games, because I tend to play them for years and years (like Final Fantasy 7 or Pirates). Plus owning a game allows me to recover my money later on through the used market.
Parent
This ain't South Korea (Score:2, Insightful)
Internet broadband in North America is really pathetic in comparison to the rest of the industrialized world. Canada and the U.S. are falling rapidly behind in broadband penetration and performance.
How is this service supposed to work reliably in such an environment?
Re: (Score:3)
Not really. See my sig.
Why don't large cities have this already? Manhattan has 1.6 million people packed into 22.6 square miles. Can they get that good a deal?
Yes, it has something to do with difference in land mass. However, even in high population density areas, the US lags well behind the rest of the world. Comcast would never survive in Japan.
How about user maps and mods and LAN play? (Score:2)
How about user maps and mods and LAN play?
talking about lag LAN play is still much better then on line play even if you have a low ping.
Graphics bottleneck... (Score:2)
Re:Graphics bottleneck... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
You can't stop progress! (Score:2)
Wait... (Score:2)
They want me to pay $50 a year for it. Then they want me to pay for games separately (assuming Steam is supposed to join) via download. This sounds exactly like the current XBox model. What is different or revolutionary about this?
On top of that, the games already stretch the hardware to the limit, so where are we getting this extra computing power?
How do they exactly plan on getting over the graphics rendering and control response hurdles that do not respond well to lag let alone network lag.
This is fai
Massive bandwidth requirements (Score:2, Interesting)
With new "Low-latency HD Video" (Score:5, Interesting)
I love how their network diagram in that article states "Low-latency HD video". As if it's a new technology. Wow, you have low-latency! I didn't even know that was out.
This is a pipe dream until they can prove this works. I want to see physical tests, not PR.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:World of Warcraft (Score:4, Funny)
Parent