Trouble At OnLive 142
Lashat writes "News of trouble at cloud gaming provider OnLive is trickling out of various sources. According to Forbes, all employees received their walking papers today. Rumors of a shutdown, buyout, or re-formation as a new company are plentiful, but the company hasn't announced anything yet. The article quotes an email sent to InXile CEO Brain Fargo from an employee within the company: 'I wanted to send a note that by the end of the day today, OnLive as an entity will no longer exist. Unfortunately, my job and everyone else's was included. A new company will be formed and the management of the company will be in contact with you about the current initiatives in place, including the titles that will remain on the service. It has been an absolute pleasure working with you and I'm sure our path with cross again.' OnLive's Director of Corporate Communications told Forbes, 'No, let me be clear. We are not going out of business.'"
While the question of whether OnLive-as-an-entity will continue is still up in the air, an internal source confirmed to Gamasutra that OnLive's entire staff has been laid off, and OnLive employees were seen outside headquarters with 'moving boxes.' Kotaku says the company has filed for protection against creditors in California (not bankruptcy, but similar).
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I'm going to have to agree with the AC... gamers and/or anyone with any reasonable technical knowledge clearly knew this was an F-ed company from the start. The only people who seemed clueless were the investors and various naive media pundits who habitually fall for unproven CES demos...
Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
spoken by someone that clearly has never used the service.
i'm a subscriber and have purchased several games spanning the spectrum, including defense grid gold (a higher-end tower defense game), osmosis, some permutations of warhammer 40k, and homefront (first person shooter). all of these games were $10 for unlimited play (with the stipulation that the company needs to still be in business i guess).
i can play all of them on my mac, windows pc, and android tablet. except homefront which required keyboard control to do anything useful. they all ran pretty great as long as i was on fast broadband.
it was a pretty awesome idea. no more installing gigabytes of crap on your PC. no more compatibility problems. games that just work wherever and whatever platform you are on.
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spoken by someone that clearly has never used the service.
i'm a subscriber and have purchased
pur_what? How are you going to play those RENTED games when they go into bankruptcy?
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You have games you've downloaded on your drive, but what of those that you don't currently have downloaded, when Steam/XBox Live/etc one day close up? They're just as gone.
If you live your life constantly afraid of the apocalypse, you'll never enjoy yourself. Sit back, buy a game on OnLive at a heavy discount during their sales, play the shit out of it, have fun, and move on. The service hasn't gone down, it works just the same.
Or are you so smug you'd rather sit and stare at Slashdot for 2+ years going,
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Right.. Because nobody else could "have fun playing video games" without OnLive...
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If Steam went out, I would just download a copy from somewhere else, there's a very Useful Network that might have what I'm looking for.
As I've been told a zillion times, the software is licensed, not sold and I'm licensed. I even have a receipt hiding in some email archive.
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Oh please.
When OnLive first came out and said they could do this there was a shitstorm of, "it's scam, this is impossible." I was one of the few that told this vocal majority sit down and wait to see what they had to offer before they go making stupid unsubstantiated claims. Once the service arrived for people to play the naysayers were wrong, it did work. Not without some technical issues, but OnLive was working hard to solve them (like wireless networks).
What OnLive did was downright bloody incredible.
Re:LOL (Score:4, Interesting)
Once the service arrived for people to play the naysayers were wrong, it did work. Not without some technical issues, but OnLive was working hard to solve them (like wireless networks). ... in my experience, really didn't seem to affect me -- the latency was something you just kinda got used to. All I hear is a bunch of bigots
And some people are happy with VHS tapes on a 19" TV, congratulations. But the majority of the PC gaming market are not those people. They are willing to pay for the best video quality and lowest latency, so no, the technology, while impressive for what it managed to accomplish, did not accomplish what it *needed to*, which is be a replacement, not a shadow, of high end PC gaming. Casual PC games are already largely server-based with no significant hardware requirements, and thus have no need for what they built. They tried to break into the high end 3D gaming market with a product few people wanted, and it failed. As the "naysayers" and "bigots" CORRECTLY predicted.
So in the end, those people saying it wouldn't succeed were right and YOU were wrong. Have fun with all of your useless OnLive game "purchases" once they shut down.
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But the majority of the PC gaming market are not those people.
I think even the majority of PC gamers wouldn't mind the ability to continue playing their games on the go on their phone or have the ability to check out a game demo within seconds instead of an hour to download a few gigabytes. Or how about playing that latest Crysis game without having to by a new PC? OnLive would have allowed all of that.
The problem with OnLive was simply lack of integration, when you have to compete with Steam, than sure as hell you will have a hard time. If OnLive would have been simp
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This.
GP's suggestion that OnLive was bound to fail because it made sacrifices in the name of convenience is laughably misinformed. Compressed digital music trumped the entrenched CD market in spite of crummy sound quality; consumers chose Netflix streaming over Blu-ray in spite of crummy video quality (and having to deal with Netflix, Inc.). Convenience CAN win if it's sold right, and OnLive would be positioned to fill the gap between $100 netbook with Facebook games and $2000 gaming PC with $60 games, wi
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They're not shutting down. Service isn't even going down.
Read the article.
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Read my post. I said "once they shut down". There is no reason to think they will be any more successful after screwing over their original investors and employees with their accounting magic and new investment than they were with their last attempt. It's now even higher risk for potential investors and customers. Not a good (re)-start for the company.
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I don't know where you live that you need "top tier PC" to play games, but where I live - I bought a cheap mid-tier PC with a mid-tier GFX card about 2 years ago and I can still play every AAA game ( if I turn down AA and AF a bit ) with much better video/sound quality and less input lag than OnLive will ever be capable of.
Also, the text doesn't smear into unreadable goo.
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their expenses seemed way too vast compared to their user base though. maybe that's the problem with the model, most of your box-farm is going to be running empty most of the time.
there's practically just one game type I could imagine the model being good for and that's mega-massively online multiplayer gaming(no cheater problem and no problem of streaming world data to clients, minimum lag for multiplayer interaction and maximum scalability for multiplayer interaction, like, have battlefield with 600 playe
Not "Going out of Business," Persay... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, I'm accusing them of ditching the American staff that grew the company into what it is today, so they can outsource the jobs to the 3rd World.
Here's hoping they prove me wrong.
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if they were just moving the things elsewhere, that would have been done in a different fashion.
they're out of money, out of liquidity - so instead of leaving employees hanging and telling them to come in without knowing if they'll be paid they showed them the door.
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I wouldn't have. (Score:3)
if they were just moving the things elsewhere, that would have been done in a different fashion.
they're out of money, out of liquidity - so instead of leaving employees hanging and telling them to come in without knowing if they'll be paid they showed them the door.
I'd be an asshat for it, but it's pretty easy to deprive people of stock options the same way that the PGE/Enron thing played out with no discernible profit to the operating company that was left after the dust settled from which to reclaim damages. "Sorry guys, we are victims too!". I was pretty screwed that way once, but that was once too many.
You derez the current company to zero your debts then rerez as a new company that buys the old company's assets at fire sale prices to claim a tax loss on the old
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
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That would be really pathetic if they did that. I would rather see them bankrupt. Sorry, to those who have purchased games from the service.
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The people shopping with Steam have been warned, over and over, that their purchases may go away. They don't care. That's their right. Good for them if it doesn't happen, too bad for them if it does. It's just a known consequence of the business model.
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Definitely a possibility.
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If they're doing that, so what?
Sounds like the company was about ready to go out of business anyway. So those jobs were gone no matter what.
If moving to another country keeps them in business, then so be it.
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It's just a major F.U. to the employee ranks and most of the management who had been working there until today.
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So it's better they just fire everyone and go out of business?
That makes no sense.
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Read this comment further down the thread. http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3056285&cid=41032105 [slashdot.org]
It doesn't seem to be a choice between stay in business or fire everyone. Since the news broke on Friday OnLive has released statements in which they claim about 50% of the old employees will be hired by the "new" company. I believe, as speculated in the comment link above, that this was done to reduce the company's liability in order to make a better sale.
Re:Not "Going out of Business," Persay... (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/per%20se [merriam-webster.com]
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It's true (Score:5, Informative)
Ex-Onlive employee here (I left a couple of years ago). I've been hearing from my OnLive friends... yup. Big big layoff. Hire these people if you see 'em, folks, they're good workers who know their stuff and have a work ethic.
The tech works, and has been fine for almost three years now; I was doing all my gaming through OnLive when I worked there, and was about 50 miles form the data center. The trouble as I see it is the same that I saw back when I left: it ceased being a technology play when it worked well enough, and turned into a business development play. They needed to:
Unfortunately, none of the biz dev plays were driven to success.
Tech is easy. Business is hard. CUtting deals is hardest of all.
Still was going to have a real tough time (Score:5, Interesting)
They can crow all they like about tech, the fact of the matter is that latency, which will be interface latency with remote video rendering, and quality will always be problems. Onlive promised to offer "maximum quality" on any device. The idea that instead of a $2k gaming rig you could get that on a cheapie computer. Ok well that might have been cool. However instead you got a 1280x720 4:2:0 video stream that was heavily compressed. That meant low rez and a loss of fine detail. Hence really you were getting the kind of thing that a low end video card or even integrated video can offer, and of course those don't have latency and downtime issues.
When the day comes that everyone has high end internet connections, maybe it is more feasible. However when you are trying to compress to a 1 mbps stream, quality won't be so impressive compared to cheap systems and that makes it a hard sell.
Re:Still was going to have a real tough time (Score:5, Informative)
Where do I begin...
With OnLive, you could play Crysis at 30fps on medium settings at 720p on a Celeron-equipped netbook with an Intel GMA950. So no, you were not getting the kind of thing integrated video can offer.
Latency depends entirely upon the quality of the network link between you and the data center. OnLive was not intended for people in Yellowknife or Cheyenne or the Azores; it was for people in densely-populated well-wired urban areas in which they had data centers. That's a lot of people, but no, it's not everyone, nor is there any sort of requirement that it be for everyone. Part of the setup was a latency/bandwidth test that you were supposed to run before you signed up. And if your ISP oversubscribed your last-mile connection to the point where you couldn't use it between 7pm and 10pm... yeah, that's a problem, but it's not universal, and it's not anything OnLive could do anything about, any more than Ford is responsible for whether on not your street has potholes. I suggest beating your ISP over the head with a lead pipe in such cases.
Yes, there's a loss of single-pixel detail. It's not perfect, and there is no requirement that it be so (any more that there is a requirement that lossy audio be forbidden for sale). Expectations must be reasonable (as must expectation-setting).
OnLive's video was tuned for 4 to 6 mbps with less than 30ms of latency, with low packet loss (less than 1%). Under such circumstances, it did well. When network conditions deteriorated, it had some automatic fallbacks to keep the framerate above 30fps for as long as possible; it would remain at least usable down to 2.5mbps/5% loss, though it wasn't pretty under those conditions. It was far, far more than glorified RDP and VNC (it wasn't a video memory buffer; the hardware captured and processed the digital video stream from a DVI interface and the digital audio stream as taken from SPDIF outputs, and injected control with a virtual USB HID). It was good tech. Low latency was achieved by essentially running unbuffered and a couple of other things that I'm not sure whether I could talk about yet.
But as I mentioned earlier, the real failure was the inability to make the deals with third parties that would turn that tech into something worth paying for.
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I don't know about you but I can't stand playing a game with input lag. Those old LCDs with 16 ms response time make games unplayable for me. OnLive's latency is much worse than that.
If you're playing some casual facebook game you probably don't care about input latency, but playing any serious game with fancy graphics having a latency like that is a deal breaker for most people. Especially for multiplayer games.
But if you want to play agains
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No, reality is that it was widely reported to be muddy and blurry. That's reality.
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Have you used it?
I played Metro 2033 and Borderlands (Game Of The Year Edition) on it. Worked just fine. Great games, both.
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No, it's completely unavailable in my area. However, the countless articles written about it are enough. The fact that so many unconnected people and publications would report it as such vs a handful of anonymous voices that always seem to pop up to defend it via message boards and blog posts helps us determine the reality.
A google search shows countless people who have used it and all complaining about the video quality. With the reporting and public opinion being heavily against you, one can only wonder w
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So you've never played it but because journalists say it's crap you decide it's crap. I have used it and had no problems with the video quality. I think what helped him form an opinion is because he's actually used the service and isn't just talking shite on Slashdot. Batman Arkham City is as playable as it is on the PS3 for example and I can play it on every device I own.
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not just journalists, tons of users across tons of websites. The volumes of users complaining about the quality of the video far outweighs the few who claim its fine, and I'll also take the screenshots as plenty of evidence.
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Have you thought that it might be because people are orders of magnitude more likely to complain than to praise. I'm really happy with my mobile network for example and recommend it to my friends but I have never posted online about how good it is. However if you Google that network you find a lot of horror stories. Same for OnLive. Some people are disappointed and say so loudly. Unless you've tried the service you have no idea if it's any good for you or not.
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Not really, because the public's reaction mirrors that of the journalists. You're basically trying to invent a giant conspiracy to bury Onlive at this point to excuse it. The bend over backwards we'd have to do to excuse all the evidence to the contrary becomes much less likely the more complicated it gets. We've got journalists, we've got players, we've got screen shots, we've got the fact that we know some companies pay to plant good reviews, and we also know that there are genuine good reviews and covera
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What giant conspiracy am I inventing here? You obviously didn't read what I wrote. Here's the key phrase: " Unless you've tried the service you have no idea if it's any good for you or not." That is a fact. A lot of people are unhappy with OnLive. I'm not one of them. I am a happy customer, however I haven't posted online about it until now. That's all. Simple and uncomplicated unlike your attempt to label me a conspiracy theorist.
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If only the world had some kind of large information sharing service where people could learn about things without the need physically touch or travel and interact with every subject in person..
the person who created something like that would really be on to a great idea!
You admit that a lot of people aren't happy with Onlive. So we have the people posting just as you are who are unhappy, we have the journalis
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Who's this we? You're the only one having a tantrum about it. I will repeat myself since you're rather stupid. Having used the service I am happy with it. You have never used the service, and therefore only have other people's opinions to go on. So since I have now posted a positive opinion about the company on the internet you must therefore, by your own system, now love OnLive as if it was the second coming of Jesus Christ.
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You're not very good at language are you? You don't know how to use the word "we" and you also can't follow basic logic in forming conclusions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We#Atypical_uses_of_we [wikipedia.org]
The system is that I go out and aggregate the opinions. It is impossible for me to try Onlive without spending a very large sum of money, probably at least $1500. Your positive opinion is a drop in the bucket against all the negative ones out there that come from multiple types of sources, so no, it's not a compellin
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You haven't aggregated all the opinions since not all of them are negative as a quick Google search or a look at their Wikipedia page will show you. My opinion is based on my experience. Yours is based on "I read it on the internet so it must be true".
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The majority are negative. That includes user opinions which don't get listed on Wikipedia. Just because there is one good opinion doesn't make it good. A quick google search shows me the overwhelming amount of opinions are negative. Honestly, the experience of someone who fails at basic things like communication really doesn't get much weight on the pile.
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I'm not asking for any weight on the pile. I expressed an opinion disagreeing with yours and you had a tantrum. That is all.
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What tantrum? Do you even know what words mean?
so far I haven't seen any evidence that you do.
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The original poster all those eons ago asked you if you had used the service. You said no but then proceeded to say how much it sucked based on your total non-experience of the service. This bugged me which is why we're still having this fairly pointless discussion.
Now let's try it in simple English. You do not know for sure that OnLive will work for you because you have never used it. I know it works for me because I use it all the time. I also know that it doesn't work for my dad because I tried it o
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actually, All those eons ago someone was talking about the "reality" of the Onlive service. They claimed the reality was that it was good. As if that was fact, I simply stated that it wasn't reality and the reality was that the majority of users and reporters who have dealt with the service found it to be unacceptable. The question about use came after that. I also clearly stated in my original post, that it was "Reported" I never claimed it as a be all and end all fact, nor even as my own opinion formed on
Re:Still was going to have a real tough time (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm no anonymous voice. My UID makes that clear, whippersnapper.
A single 2560x1600 screen cap from a video stream over an unknown quality connection? That's your proof? It's like you're saying JPEG and MP3 don't work because they're lossy.
Experience. I though that was clear. Actual experience. The thing that you don't have. This is what irks me about particular detractors, the ones talking out their asses. They make comments about the service quality without having even tried it. Maybe you can't get it at home, but go visit a friend and try it there, jeez. It's free. And then you'll be able to talk about it knowledgeably.
And you'll see that quality is not a binary thing. All the little factors come together in a complex way to make the gaming experience. You can't just sum latency, framerate, and resolution to get a scalar value of quality, saying the system is good or bad. You have to play it. Conceiving of quality in black and white terms is the same conceptual trap as thinking that there's a "best" product, solution, distro, car, or whatever.
Just give it a try and think for yourself.
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No, that's called an example, for someone with so much experience, you sure are pretty clueless. The proof is in the countless poor reviewers from professionals and regular users found all over the internet. This service might work well on some golden connection, but most people don't have access to that. Fantastic, bandwidth unlimited
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Your implication that I provincially assumed that you were in a country where the service is offered is ... just ... correct. Pardon my assumption. That was wrong of me.
I still stand by my assertion that a person can't make a reasonable evaluation of the service based on what they hear from other people. Certainly, at least, not to the degree that they should be telling others how good or bad it is.
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No it's not. I've read plenty of sites where plenty of users have tried it and said they found the video quality is poor.
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It all depends on your gaming situation. If top-notch graphics are your primary concern, yes, OnLive sucks. Multiplayer for most games sucks since it tends to just be amongst other OnLive players so there's a smaller number of them.
Or, if you are a cheap-ass like me, it's great. They have had numerous sales that rival Steam's. 75% off coupons a multitude of times, for any one game on the service. Where can you catch a game a week or so out from release at 75% off? Also, I pre-ordered Saints Row 3 on O
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For calling decades old scientist's joke [wikipedia.org] "a joke from Big Bang Theory", you must immediately a) hand in your geek badge, and b) give up your 6 digit UID.
Failure to comply will be met with begrudging acceptance with prejudice.
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I love you, Slashdot. I learn something new every day.
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The basic fundamental problem is that ISPs do oversell their connections as SOP and people want to play games at prime time and therefore the product is useless to the majority of even the intended customers, let alone the customers further out into the boondocks. You may have had good results 50 miles from the server but that's not really much of an endorsement.
Great that users with pathetic computers can play games if they happen to have an ideal network connection, but that's just not that huge a market.
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"When the day comes that everyone has high end internet connections, maybe it is more feasible."
yea, we said the same thing back in dialup days, guess what happened? The games got more complex, and the internet doesn't improve nearly as quick
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Latency really is an issue in single player games. It's only not an issue in turn based games. FPS, racing games, platformers all highly susceptible to latency.
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And tech (as in physical hardware) doesn't exist without a viable business behind it.
The problem is quite simple - you have to buy computers capable of running the game, buy the game, buy the techs to support that all, buy the datacenter space and bandwidth to keep up, buy other things to capture the image and compress the streams, etc. and then sell it to the user for less than the cost of the game itself.
It doesn't work. And, that aside, it was nothing more than video-streaming of a moving image, somethi
Re:It's true (Score:5, Funny)
I'm an ex-employee, too. Weren't you the guy who used to suck my dick in the restrooms every day at about noon?
No, that was some troll from Slashdot.
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Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
I never understood the appeal given many games must really suck to play with all the control latency and video buffering.
How much more can a used xbox/titles really cost over time vs subscription cost of onlive service?
No secret I've always had a negative opinion mostly due to the egregious waste of bandwidth and resources but also for failing to see the market value.
My bet at the time they would be done in three months and they lasted quite a bit longer so excellent job on execution.
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While never using it myself, the reviews I saw did not make it seem that bad.
Maybe for twitch-tastic fighting games, you'd have an issue but you could easily play any RPG, FPS, or similar game without issue.
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Informative)
I tried it out. Latency wasn't great, but was tolerable. Major problem was image quality; no matter how fast a connection you threw at it, the bitrate never scaled high enough for good quality under high motion.
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
Jesus H. Christ, people! What's so insightful about "I don't get it because I imagine it would suck" when there's a freakin' free trial available?
Go play the free games and decide for yourself just how good the technology is.
It's not hard and then you can stop talking out your ass.
The customers have spoken (Score:4, Insightful)
We still don't want computing to be a rentable service.
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What, you're under the impression that OnLive is a typical public cloud service? They rent virtual desktops, and there doesn't seem to be much demand for that.
More typical are services like Windows Azure and AWS, which concentrate on backend services. Those are very healthy indeed.
WOW, people are still renting gaming (Score:1)
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GP said computing, not gaming. WoW and EQ players don't rent the computers that run their game clients.
--Jeremy
OnLive vs. OnLive Desktop (Score:2)
GP said computing, not gaming.
The article is about OnLive. OnLive began as a gaming service, and the content of the front page of www.onlive.com still mentions games, not OnLive Desktop.
WoW and EQ players don't rent the computers that run their game clients.
They do rent the computers that run their game servers. This raises the philosophical question of where the game actually is.
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GP said computing, not gaming.
The article is about OnLive. OnLive began as a gaming service, and the content of the front page of www.onlive.com still mentions games, not OnLive Desktop.
WoW and EQ players don't rent the computers that run their game clients.
They do rent the computers that run their game servers. This raises the philosophical question of where the game actually is.
quite frankly onlive should have streamed the opengl stream and not video, but that would have made the client end a lot more complex and the whole thing a lot more complex operation.
ironically the only type of games their thing would be great would be for mmorpg's which would be able to scale interaction to a whole new level with every players game instances being run in the same data center.
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You could rent a game for a short period for a very low price. you could perma-rent the game for a less low price. They also had a "play anything for fixed monthly price." deal. Finally, their trial deal was that you could play something like an hour of something like any forty things for free, and I think there was even a way to regenerate trial hours.
Tell me about GameStop's free trial period on used games...
Did 'The Cloud' finally burst? (Score:2)
Are we starting to see reality run into the cloud hype, or is this just ordinary everyday business failure?
OuLive-OnBox-SteamYa (Score:1)
My money is that Valve or someone with real business ability will absorb the tech and re-bundle it in new ways to serve advertisements on a premium paid service.
A shame for Ouya if not kept alive (Score:3)
Seems a shame for the Ouya platform if their 'deal' with Onlive isn't kept alive after the restructuring/relaunching/whatever they're doing over there.
Ouya simply doesn't have the hardware to run e.g. battlefield. However, it has the hardware just fine to run an Onlive client, meaning even the 'hard core' gamers (if they can deal with the bit of latency) could get their fill.
It's unfortunate that it appears not enough publishers were willing to go with Onlive - although I suspect that's a combination of income from game sales themselves and pressure from certain hardware companies that like seeing their logo slapped on triple-A titles.
Hopefully they can reorganize, rethink their business strategy, and get to a successful formula.
On the other hand.. outside of the Ouya.. take a budget graphics card, drop it into a computer from 2 years ago, and you'll still be gaming along with the guy next door with a $4k setup - just slightly less flashy. Add to that data use limits likely to make their comeback (many ISPs in the U.S. already do, iirc), and perhaps it's just not as attractive as it was when they first launched.
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even the 'hard core' gamers (if they can deal with the bit of latency) could get their fill.
No "hardcore" gamer is going to accept heavily compressed and blurry chroma subsampled video streams. Even a low quality video card gives better quality output.
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We only accept luminance-subsampled images, you insensitive clod!
Total lack of leadership - Insert Dilbert Jokes (Score:1)
That's what I don't like about Corporatism (Score:4, Insightful)
Gaikai (Score:1)
Was just a way to remove employee equity? (Score:5, Interesting)
that is why we need unions in TECH (Score:5, Funny)
that is why we need unions in TECH so employee don't get f* over.
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In the case of a startup with stock options, the employees ARE investors.
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Right, so that the investors get screwed instead. Why would someone invest in a company (say, GM) when the company's just going to be handed over to a labor union, stripping the stock from the people who invested and allowed it to exist in the first place?
investors such as creditors, employees working for equity etc _are_ getting fucked. probably some guys who gave them just cash are getting fucked by this too. it just favors whoever had the controlling interest on it.
Mod parent up (Score:2)
Mod parent up. That appears to be exactly what happened.
Expect employee lawsuits over this.
Re: (Score:2)
It seems to me that the key factor here will be whether this was a true arm's-length transaction or not. Were the OnLive assets sold at a fair market price because the company in its existing form just wasn't profitable? In that case, the equity probably was worthless, and it was reasonable to try to salvage something from the wreckage. Or were the assets sold at a knock-down price to a company controlled by the existing management, or people closely associated with management? If that's the case, then the
What a douchey email (Score:2)
"I wanted to send a note that...." should be followed by something like "...the refrigerators will be cleaned over the weekend", not "...you're all fired."
pressing charges? (Score:2)
I wanted to send a note that by the end of the day today, OnLive as an entity will no longer exist.
but corporations are people too! if you cause them to stop existing then that is MURDER!