WoW On an iPad Via Gaikai

Gametap writes "If cloud gaming works for enough genres, it can't help but find popularity. Even just a game like WoW might be enough to make it happen, and Gaikai's Dave Perry posted a picture of doing just that on an iPad. So is it the future or not? Could somebody make a tablet with nothing more than a screen, battery, network port, and video decoder, and have it be a good gaming platform? Will it change the mobile, PC, console, and TV world as we know it? Lots of questions, lots of skepticism, lots of players and money being invested — but one thing is for sure: it will be very interesting to see how this evolves."

Input

[Barny]

Is ever the problem with such systems, the only two mmog I have ever been able to play reasonably well with just touch pad is EVE-Online and City of Heroes/Villains (and that in a limited capacity, requiring a lot of macros).

Without commenting on the whole "which MMOG is bigger/better" thing, I would hazard to guess that for this to work, the games would HAVE to be built for it.

Yeah right

[DryGrian]

I can't even get a good framerate with Quake 3 on my netbook. Gaming requires powerful video hardware which requires bigger power supplies than tiny mobile devices can deliver; at least, that's the explanation I accepted.

Gaming platform

[Thanshin]

Could somebody make a tablet with nothing more than a screen, battery, network port, and video decoder, and have it be a good gaming platform?

It depends on your definition of "Good gaming platform".

From the top of my head, I could certainly play Go, Civ, Galciv, BB, and just about anything that's turn based.

I wouldn't try playing anything with direct action, to avoid the frustration of high ping and lag spikes.

Re:Yeah right

[tnok85]

The whole point of this 'cloud gaming' thing is that you don't need a powerful graphics card to run games. It's essentially a streaming video of the game from a server that does have the hardware to run the game. Sort of like OnLive.<p>

Although I agree nothing is going to come of this, I'm pretty sure there have been a dozen "WoW on the iPhone!" stories too.

Tablet PC's can already do this?

[Ziekheid]

Wouldn't any Tablet PC with a Windows OS installed on it just run WoW for years already? Am I missing something here?

Re:Tablet PC's can already do this?

[Ziekheid]

Oh and also, since this seems to be about streamed gaming, wouldn't any Tablet PC.. what am I saying.. any device with a compatible browser be able to do so?

Sum of the parts

[Anonymous Coward]

Could somebody make a tablet with nothing more than a screen, battery, network port, and video decoder, and have it be a good gaming platform?

Anymore that you could take random car parts and weld them together and drive your kids to school in it.

Latency.

[Zencyde]

Does no one else get offended at the suggestion of real-time cloud gaming due to obvious latency issues? It's bad enough having my network ping at 100ms, I don't need it to take 100ms for a screen refresh. Or is there something about the implementation I'm missing?

Fancy picture != Nice to play

[thegarbz]

So we have a picture, and we can see that it works. Heck it may even be playable to some extent but that is hardly the point. We're at a stage where gamers will spend $100+ on a cabled mouse and buy the most perfect friction free mousepad they can find to go with it to reduce lag in their gameplay. Here we have exactly the opposite. The game may have been "pictured" but did the guy manage to get anywhere in a team raid?

Re:Tablet PC's can already do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but then you cannot make an iNews out of it. Slashdot has essentially become an Apple news site. They have to meet their 2 iNews per day quota.

Quick question: Which company got its own working slashdot subdomain? (Hint: it's Apple)

Re:Latency.

[bluesatin]

I'd imagine this screen-refresh issue would be solved if the rendering was done at home with your desktop PC and was then streamed to you sitting in your living room onto your tablet of choice. I've always wondered if it would be a cool idea to have a 'home server' that just ran dummy machines at the end to just completely run off the server, it'd mean you could use nearly any device and have all the same interface.

Mind you I'm currently in a flat with 5 people in it, so I'd imagine that's really the minimum you'd want this setup for (or if you had 5 people in total that are in the flat a lot).

Re:PC-only MMO?

[CubicleView]

The whole I'm a PC I'm a Mac thing is BS. My understanding of the term PC is Personal Computer. That definition should be OS agnostic.

No good for action gaming due to latency?

[AC-x]

I can't see how this streaming service could be practical for any game with action in it.

Anyone remember playing the original Quake online (not Quake World)? It didn't have motion prediction so before your player reacted to controls it needed a complete server round trip. That means there would be lag between when you pressed a key and your player react.

All network games these days move your player in real time then compensate on the server, but if the server is handling the display this becomes impossible. Sure internet connections have got much faster since then but extra delay would be introduced with the video encoding / decoding.

We put up with network lag back in the day but I can't imagine anyone putting up with it these days. It's a nice idea but I wouldn't put much hope in it catching on.