Ed
04-15-2009, 01:35 PM
Article From: http://immoralgamers.com/?p=481
OnLive: DOA or the Next Big Thing?
Posted on April 15th, 2009
Soapbox
The future looks a lot like a rubber band to me.
I think we can all accept that, as a species, we like to shoot good ideas down. Dreams; aspirations; ambition: none of these things stand a chance against cynical guffaws, pessimism, and a jaded suspicion of the new. You might have seen OnLive in the gaming media: it’s an internet based game streaming service. Games are processed on servers, then squeezed through the internet to the customer’s OnLive console, thus bypassing the need for expensive platforms and putting the focus on the games. It’s an idea which has also captured the attention of the ‘Real’ media. It’s an idea which seems to be so good, so innovative and progressive, that it will absolutely, certainly, quite catastrophically fail. Hurrah for failure!
The first stumbling block people pick up on is the medium of transmission. The sound and visuals for a hi-def game comprise a lot of information. According to OnLive’s website, the connection needed for a standard definition game will be 1.5Mbps; for a 720p screen, 5Mbps will be required; 1080p, presumably, will require even more. These are probably minimum specifications in optimal conditions; even if you do have a fast connection, using it will render the connection all but useless for anyone else on the network. An exclusive, consistent connection will be needed if you want to play a game while your housemate is downloading porn. Bit of a hidden cost, really, a whole high-speed internet connection per OnLive console. Still, internet connections are getting faster all the time, ceratinly in the more civilised areas of the world. Not great news for those of us in England struggling along on a prehistoric broadband which slows to a crawl every few hours, but that’s life. Boo-hoo.
Wouldn’t it be great if the thing on the right was the console, and the box was the controller?
The next thorn on the path to Nirvana is lag, obviously. Lag is sometimes a necessary evil for those who want to play against other people over the internet; you accept it and make the best of it you can. lag in single players, however, is positively perverse. Racing games, shooters and fighters are all hit very badly by lag. Initial reports on OnLive suggest the lag is not noticeable, but all these reports do so with the caveat that these were demos held in relatively close proximity to the OnLive servers, and the servers themselves were not under any strain at the time. How will it handle hundreds of thousands of players bashing buttons simultaneously, many with interent connections towards the lower-end, many of whom will be spread out across the world, some thousands of miles from the servers. Internet connections ought to have improved by then, and the team behind OnLive are clearly clever enough to have taken thses problems into account, but only time will tell how well OnLive works in real-world conditions.
OnLive will also take a lot of control from the hands of gamers. On the plus side this should mean less cheating, wallhacks, and all that sort of nonsense; less, that is, until people figure out how to get around the OnLive anti-cheating system and plug something in between their OnLive box and the internet connection. People are at their cleverest when looking for ways to cheat and steal. It will guarantee a certain homogeneity, essentially. Some have said this will not bode well for the mod scene, although people who use mods are probably a minority of PC gamers, themselves a minority of gamers overall, especially if we’re including Wii owners in the gamer category. The hardcore, who see the ability to fiddle with the files that make up a game as an inalienable right, are generally pretty up to date with PC upgrades anyway, so overall they’re probably not a target audience.
Perhaps it’s just that there’s something unnerving about the centralization of information proposed with OnLive. It’s not insidious, but it just seems like a bad idea. You know how it is: you put all your eggs in one basket, a new, startup basket with a bright future. But setting up an ambitious new basket in this uncertain economic climate; what if the basket goes bust? And you lose all the eggs you’ve downloaded…maybe I should stop the basket analogy. It’s the same as with any digital delivery program, I suppose, except with OnLive, unlike with Steam, the game is not stored on anything you own, it’s just piped to you on the fly. Likewise, if you cancel your subscription with OnLive, you will almost certainly lose access to the games you’ve bought through them. And if it is subscription based, how long will you keep games for? Not every cost could be covered by a subscription.
An interface. Don’t say I never get you anything.
We can also assume that some companies will not be supporting OnLive. Valve, for instance, will not be releasing games on a platform which competes with its own digital delivery service. Valve may not be much of a force in console gaming, but the pedigree of their games and the strength of Steam as a rival can’t be overstated. We also know that OnLive will almost certainly not be compatible with Xbox Live and PSN, so while it will apparently offer multiplayer in some form, it will only be one more service to sign in to and one more account to manage. It seems impossible that OnLive will therefore replace the consoles people already own or become the compromise machine for people who do not want to commit to any one manufacturer. Unless you want to buy the games you already have again for OnLive, and throw out your old games uncertain of whether OnLive will offer them, you’ll still have a living room full of machines and controllers.
Ultimately, I just don’t think it’s that prohibitive a cost to buy a console and physical games. It does, at least, give a feeling of security, of ownership, which can only be taken away by RRODs or burglars. OnLive’s strength is that the only physical problems are the medium of transmission, the internet connection. You won’t have to worry about lost or damaged discs or the console imploding, or upgrading your PC to keep up with latest advances in whatever kind of ‘mapping’ games are using these days- Per-pixel eyebrow mapping, or whatever. I think the better compromise takes something from both; you download games to your console, they are stored on the hard drive, and you can play games which you have bought even if you cancel your subscription. OnLive takes away some of the problems associated with gaming, with the limitations of physical media, but in doing so it takes away the advantages too, the ability to process your own data from your own living room, the ownership. It’s tempting to be able to buy an entry-level PC and be able to play top-spec games, but taking away consoles and replacing them with distant servers seems to be slightly solving a problem which doesn’t exist, and shifts the possibility of failure onto your internet connection or the capability of OnLive’s servers.
So, will OnLive fail? I don’t know, because while I said before that we all love to see a good idea fail, I think I prefer watching something succeed against all the odds, and watching all the naysayers backtrack, recant, and eat their hats. Even if OnLive fails, it wont be the last of its kind.
The future’s bright, the future’s an orange rubber band.
OnLive: DOA or the Next Big Thing?
Posted on April 15th, 2009
Soapbox
The future looks a lot like a rubber band to me.
I think we can all accept that, as a species, we like to shoot good ideas down. Dreams; aspirations; ambition: none of these things stand a chance against cynical guffaws, pessimism, and a jaded suspicion of the new. You might have seen OnLive in the gaming media: it’s an internet based game streaming service. Games are processed on servers, then squeezed through the internet to the customer’s OnLive console, thus bypassing the need for expensive platforms and putting the focus on the games. It’s an idea which has also captured the attention of the ‘Real’ media. It’s an idea which seems to be so good, so innovative and progressive, that it will absolutely, certainly, quite catastrophically fail. Hurrah for failure!
The first stumbling block people pick up on is the medium of transmission. The sound and visuals for a hi-def game comprise a lot of information. According to OnLive’s website, the connection needed for a standard definition game will be 1.5Mbps; for a 720p screen, 5Mbps will be required; 1080p, presumably, will require even more. These are probably minimum specifications in optimal conditions; even if you do have a fast connection, using it will render the connection all but useless for anyone else on the network. An exclusive, consistent connection will be needed if you want to play a game while your housemate is downloading porn. Bit of a hidden cost, really, a whole high-speed internet connection per OnLive console. Still, internet connections are getting faster all the time, ceratinly in the more civilised areas of the world. Not great news for those of us in England struggling along on a prehistoric broadband which slows to a crawl every few hours, but that’s life. Boo-hoo.
Wouldn’t it be great if the thing on the right was the console, and the box was the controller?
The next thorn on the path to Nirvana is lag, obviously. Lag is sometimes a necessary evil for those who want to play against other people over the internet; you accept it and make the best of it you can. lag in single players, however, is positively perverse. Racing games, shooters and fighters are all hit very badly by lag. Initial reports on OnLive suggest the lag is not noticeable, but all these reports do so with the caveat that these were demos held in relatively close proximity to the OnLive servers, and the servers themselves were not under any strain at the time. How will it handle hundreds of thousands of players bashing buttons simultaneously, many with interent connections towards the lower-end, many of whom will be spread out across the world, some thousands of miles from the servers. Internet connections ought to have improved by then, and the team behind OnLive are clearly clever enough to have taken thses problems into account, but only time will tell how well OnLive works in real-world conditions.
OnLive will also take a lot of control from the hands of gamers. On the plus side this should mean less cheating, wallhacks, and all that sort of nonsense; less, that is, until people figure out how to get around the OnLive anti-cheating system and plug something in between their OnLive box and the internet connection. People are at their cleverest when looking for ways to cheat and steal. It will guarantee a certain homogeneity, essentially. Some have said this will not bode well for the mod scene, although people who use mods are probably a minority of PC gamers, themselves a minority of gamers overall, especially if we’re including Wii owners in the gamer category. The hardcore, who see the ability to fiddle with the files that make up a game as an inalienable right, are generally pretty up to date with PC upgrades anyway, so overall they’re probably not a target audience.
Perhaps it’s just that there’s something unnerving about the centralization of information proposed with OnLive. It’s not insidious, but it just seems like a bad idea. You know how it is: you put all your eggs in one basket, a new, startup basket with a bright future. But setting up an ambitious new basket in this uncertain economic climate; what if the basket goes bust? And you lose all the eggs you’ve downloaded…maybe I should stop the basket analogy. It’s the same as with any digital delivery program, I suppose, except with OnLive, unlike with Steam, the game is not stored on anything you own, it’s just piped to you on the fly. Likewise, if you cancel your subscription with OnLive, you will almost certainly lose access to the games you’ve bought through them. And if it is subscription based, how long will you keep games for? Not every cost could be covered by a subscription.
An interface. Don’t say I never get you anything.
We can also assume that some companies will not be supporting OnLive. Valve, for instance, will not be releasing games on a platform which competes with its own digital delivery service. Valve may not be much of a force in console gaming, but the pedigree of their games and the strength of Steam as a rival can’t be overstated. We also know that OnLive will almost certainly not be compatible with Xbox Live and PSN, so while it will apparently offer multiplayer in some form, it will only be one more service to sign in to and one more account to manage. It seems impossible that OnLive will therefore replace the consoles people already own or become the compromise machine for people who do not want to commit to any one manufacturer. Unless you want to buy the games you already have again for OnLive, and throw out your old games uncertain of whether OnLive will offer them, you’ll still have a living room full of machines and controllers.
Ultimately, I just don’t think it’s that prohibitive a cost to buy a console and physical games. It does, at least, give a feeling of security, of ownership, which can only be taken away by RRODs or burglars. OnLive’s strength is that the only physical problems are the medium of transmission, the internet connection. You won’t have to worry about lost or damaged discs or the console imploding, or upgrading your PC to keep up with latest advances in whatever kind of ‘mapping’ games are using these days- Per-pixel eyebrow mapping, or whatever. I think the better compromise takes something from both; you download games to your console, they are stored on the hard drive, and you can play games which you have bought even if you cancel your subscription. OnLive takes away some of the problems associated with gaming, with the limitations of physical media, but in doing so it takes away the advantages too, the ability to process your own data from your own living room, the ownership. It’s tempting to be able to buy an entry-level PC and be able to play top-spec games, but taking away consoles and replacing them with distant servers seems to be slightly solving a problem which doesn’t exist, and shifts the possibility of failure onto your internet connection or the capability of OnLive’s servers.
So, will OnLive fail? I don’t know, because while I said before that we all love to see a good idea fail, I think I prefer watching something succeed against all the odds, and watching all the naysayers backtrack, recant, and eat their hats. Even if OnLive fails, it wont be the last of its kind.
The future’s bright, the future’s an orange rubber band.