New Service Aims To Replace Consoles With Cloud Gaming 305
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."
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.
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 latency might be a real pain then?
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.
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.
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?
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:Caps (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm.
Anyone else reminded of The Phantom [wikipedia.org]?
Re:No thanks (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone that actually thinks this is viable is clearly a moron, the lag would make it totally unplayable.
This is just venture capital BS to fool the stupid non technical investors...
I'm surprised Slashdot are stupid enough to even pick up on it..
Re:No thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No thanks (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 when I moved to a LCD monitor. It's not because my reaction time was decreased. Lag is a serious consideration for FPS games. It works well for MMOs because you aren't rocket jumping and popping off head shots while in mid air. Online shooters are a pain as well. I don't know how many times I've shot people to have nothing happen because their client doesn't agree or registered the shot differently.
Re:My predictions (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".
Time will tell ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Lots of comments here about potential roadblocks, stutters and genuine questions about viability. I'll leave that to everyone else, and just say this:
If this works (and time will tell), for fifty bucks a year, all in, I'm buying. It's that simple.
And so will everyone else. Like I said, maybe there are issues ... I don't know. But there is a huge potential for a paradigm shift here, and let there be no doubt that these guys will have all the heavyweights breathing down their necks. Lawsuits on one side, competing services on the other. Someone, eventually, will win out, though.
Hopefully gamers will chose the lesser of the evils, the truly bad choices have to admit defeat and give up, and we're left with a win for the consumer, for a change.
I don't really know why, but for some reason this reminds me of the old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."
Re:What is likely to happen (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Caps (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: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.
Re:No thanks (Score:2, Insightful)
In that case, why would you need a server farm to pump out the greatest graphics in the world in order to play a RTS? Most RTS are a few years behind FPS games like Crysis.
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.
Re:Image bandwidth (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
I think he means High Definition 1280x720 (720p) and 1920x1080 (1080p) that the PS3 and Xbox360 are capable of not the Standard definition of 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL) the Wii is only capable of :)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Caps (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No thanks (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:Caps (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:READ TEH ARTICLES MUCH?? (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.