The first tech media darling has already blasted its way through the clutter at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco — OnLive, the new company to come from longtime serial tech entrepreneur Steve Perlman.
Phrases like “game changer” are being tossed about to describe OnLive’s technology, which essentially creates the new category of cloud gaming for play on computers and TVs. Forget about pricey consoles, fingerprint-smudged game discs and Xbox Red Rings of Death; a new video compression system developed by OnLive means the company’s servers can host all the gaming technology like rendering and storage. All the gamer would have to do is log on and start playing. The company is promising no lag time on its streams.
OnLive will support PCs and Macs, but consumers will need to buy a paperback book-sized mini-console and accompanying controller if they want to play games in 720p HD on their big-screen TVs. No prices have been announced yet.
Creating the Buzz
OnLive had already given sneak previews to several technology journalists and was planning to make its official debut at a Tuesday evening (Pacific Time) press conference, but public relations spokesperson Tiffany Sterling told TechNewsWorld that the Hollywood trade publication Variety broke an embargo, so word began getting out early about Perlman’s new initiative.
So is it the true game-changer for the gaming industry? Can a virtual gaming console, as some are describing OnLive’s capabilities, put the fear of God — or at least “Halo’s” Master Chief — into companies like Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony?
“They should either be afraid or seize the opportunity,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld. “It lowers the cost of the console to almost nothing, and these guys all lose money on the consoles, so it eliminates the Playstation 3 problem off the bat. You could give consoles away for free for something like this. So they either embrace it or it’s a go-out-of-business scenario. It depends on how they treat it.”
It may take some time for cloud gaming to mature, but OnLive’s development of its compression technology — and the right pricing strategy — effectively puts the gaming industry on Internet time, Enderle says.
The Effect on Gaming Software
Much of the media buzz surrounding OnLive revolves around the partnerships it is announcing at its debut. Those attending Tuesday’s press conference will be able to watch demonstrations of games from eight of the industry’s major software companies, including Electronic Arts, Atari, Ubisoft, Eidos, Take-Two Interactive and Warner Bros.
Why wouldn’t those who make the games applaud the arrival of OnLive? “It potentially explodes their available audience, making it much larger,” Enderle said. “It will give them access at a much lower potential cost, so this can do wonderful things for their revenue. It creates a market that for the most part is paying as they play.
“On the other hand, you have to keep those players happy. You really want to engage them and keep them playing.” In that respect, Enderle says OnLive truly puts gaming and interactive entertainment on the same level as network television programming. When you add the potential for in-game advertising, which could result in free games thanks to a new funding source, “you could see a real melding of traditional media and this interactive stuff. This is just the beginning,” he said.
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A system which does all physics, scripting, object management, etc. on the server end. And, guess what! For most people its not the bandwidth needed to "stream" textures, objects locations, and general display stuff, to the client end, or even the client itself, which is the biggest mess. 95% of all the lag, poor performance, etc. is on the "server" end, because, instead of just keeping general track of position as rotation of objects, then letting the end client "render" it all from pre-stored data, its taking ***masses*** of prestored data, then trying to "make" all the information needed for the client to "see" what the server knows is going on. There is a massive bottleneck on the server end, where every single user adds the equivalent a new "data stream" to the mess, not including script tests, to see what, if anything, various objects are supposed to be doing.
Mind, most games will be using "static" data, like the existing ones, so that helps, some, but you are still talking about your "cloud" having say 60-70 users, or more, per server, and the hardware needing to "somehow" render 60-70 video streams, specific to what it taking place on "that" server. You can’t do that reliably, in many cases, with as little as *two* equivalent streams, using the latest video card, on a stand alone, not-online, game. They want to produce 60-70 such video streams, on.. who knows how many servers (but since zones are complex, you have to assume one zone per server, never mind what ever your "cloud" looks like…
I don’t know. Seems to me its likely to have fixed resolution, un-changeable "settings" for what quality is produced (which won’t be the best a client end machine might be capable of with the best hardware), and like SL when the asset and data management gets bogged down trying to deal with more than 40 people in a sim, it will lag like hell, because it won’t just be doing all the stuff SL does on the server end, and which they are now looking at offloading, to some extent, back to the fracking client end, but trying to produce a huge number of the actual "video" streams at the same time, on machines that are "designed" to, at most, if you have say two high end cards, produce only 2-4 such streams at one time.
I mean, seriously, there isn’t even enough bandwidth on the hardware itself to stream the "data" needed to run such a game to more than 2, possibly 3, at a stretch, cards. So, what, they are going to buy three $400+ graphics cards per cloud computer, and run 6 players per machine, or something? Unless they are talking about arcade games, instead of MMO style games, this sounds absurd to the point of being incomprehensible.
bad bad bad! greed, greed, and greed! He is going to hog the public resource to make petty profit.