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."
Image bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
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: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.
Re:Image bandwidth (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?
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.
Re:Graphics bottleneck... (Score:5, Interesting)
Zeebo - brazilian console 100% online (Score:1, Interesting)
As a brazilian, i'm proud to introduce to the slashdot comunity the first brazilian video game console, 100% online content distibution: http://www.zeebo.com.br . From Tectoy, former SEGA distibutor in Brazil.
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.
Re:Caps (Score:1, Interesting)
So what kind of servers would they be using to do good quality h.264 compression on a raw stream (plus audio) and not have it go blockly (ala cable/satellite when showing a live football match and the camera pans quickly)?
Additionally I read somewhere 80% of people (in the UK at any rate) are on 2Mbps.
AWS, Azure (Score:3, Interesting)
Amazon Web Services [amazon.com] and Windows Azure [microsoft.com] beg to differ.
Re:Caps (Score:3, Interesting)