OnLive's Epic Plan For a New Type of Video Game

An anonymous reader writes "OnLive's had a tough twelve months any way you look at it, but as a new profile of the cloud game streaming service points out, throughout it all, service never dropped, and the number of platforms it's on keeps growing. Up next is the tiny Ouya console, but in a wide-ranging interview, OnLive's general manager talks up plans to bring MMOs to the service, and even a whole new type of video game, one that will run on many servers, not just one PC: 'Look at how CGI has changed cinema over the last few years — you can do CGI essentially realtime. It could completely change what a video game looks like. That leads us to new technologies. Then game designers say, "What could I really do with a computing platform that is so powerful but also available across so many devices?" You're no longer constrained by computing power — that has tremendous opportunity.'"

Re:Not constrained

[h4rr4r]

Forget constrained by bandwidth, the real problem is latency. Unless they can put a data center in every city they plan to service they can basically forget about it.

Re:Not constrained

[wolfhead]

I live in a major city and have a pretty fast connection, I tried OnLive a bit last year and felt the video stream was still way too compressed. Why have real-time rendering in a game if the stream of it is going to be filled with artifacts and a capped frame rate?

Re:Not constrained

[SpeedBump0619]

Don't think so small. You could write a real-time ray-tracer using LOGO and turtle graphics. Talk about geek cred!

Re:Not constrained

[vlm]

if he can't make the finances work by renting one pc for a guy.

This is the best question about their whole business model. The stereotypical gamer is supposed to be a lumbering herd animal, right? Everyone plays the same game at the same time together online? So you can't make money off over subscription. So instead of the user directly financing a gaming PC, they'll intermediate themselves in between that transaction by providing .... Um...

I can't see the health club model working either, where you get people to sign up for new years resolution and then never see them again.

So when you strip away the tech angle, what is their business model exactly?

Re:Not constrained

[heson]

Correct, and they aim for the wrong type of latency demanding games. To survive they must go for games that can handle bad latency. OnLive has a huge potential but only if they stop selling an impossible product and start going for achievable goals.

Guess: They have sold a lie to investors and are stuck in it.

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