OnLive and Gaikai — How To Stop a Gaming Revolution 125
happierr writes "The gaming industry has been struggling in the last few months, and it is about to struggle even more when OnLive and Gaikai launch later this year. The new services are both a step in the right direction to counter piracy and provide easily-accessible gaming to people with low-end PCs. They might even do for PC gaming what the Wii did for casual gaming; greatly expand the market and draw interest from people who would not ordinarily play games. The services are a real threat for the Big Three video game companies (Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo). How will they combat these revolutionary services? There are a few steps that the Big Three are taking to combat the New Two, such as an increased reliance on peripherals and vision cameras, exclusivity deals, and more online multiplayer features, which OnLive and Gaikai will have a hard time matching."
Re:Latency (Score:4, Interesting)
Latency isn't a problem for my country. There are two major ISPs and one is dedicated in high bandwidth while the other in low latency. They're so cheap that just for on-line gaming and for on-line streaming at once, I would gladly subscribe to both (I don't play a lot of games so it's not my case, but I have some friends who are subscribed to both). This is a killer for your whole post, since the 50-100ms is considered "a lot" if you're subscribed to one of the ISPs and it's probably the fault of your own hardware. You get ping replies like 15-25ms between any of their subscribers. They move quick enough for a whole on-line gaming industry as described in the article so they may not be able to couple the whole world, but they can do it country-by-country where it's possible and in many countries it is possible., believe me.