Ed
03-25-2009, 07:55 PM
Article From: http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/entertainment/41834997.html
Beyond the hype of OnLive
By Stanley A. Miller II of the Journal Sentinel
Mar. 25, 2009 12:07 p.m.
A new online gaming service called OnLive announced yesterday it will launch a product this year that will stream high-games over the Net to even low-end computers, a new model that some claim will challenge the big players in gaming like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. You can read the story from USA Today, or what is essentially regurgitated public-relations garbage from Gamespot if you want more details on it.
I was immediately skeptical of the startup, but other assignments prevented me from ranting about it until now:
OnLive has signed up some big publishers to sell games over their network, but I'm wary of their thin-client model. Despite the blue-sky "wave of the future" cloud-computing hype OnLive is using to market their wares, what many of game "journalists" failed to spotlight yesterday is that you need to have a really fast, consistent Internet connection.
Most people aren't lucky enough to have FIOS. The problem with OnLive's model is that if games become more advanced -- and of course they will -- that means more data that needs to be pushed to a server. And because it's streamed over the Net, it will be cracked within a matter of days, and there will be plenty of denial-of-service attacks from hackers. So OnLive will need to encrypt their streams (at least a 1024 bit key), which will require hardware on the other end to decrypt, which will slow things down as it decrypts on the fly.
The company claims users will be able to play streamed games via OnLive with no lag as long as their Internet connections meet minimum thresholds. For standard-definition play, that would mean a minimum 1.5 Mbps connection, and for high-definition, 5 Mbps.
Frankly, I am lucky to get 5 MBps, and that is only on good days. Plus, most ISPs have a cap of 60 GB to 100 GB a month. If you need to push 5 Mbps, that means you push 625KB a second. If you sustain that rate of transfer, you could run out your cap in about 27 hours. Now granted you won't usually sustain that much, but that is the theoretical math.
Perhaps a better example: At the 5 Mbps OnLive requires for HD gaming, a Time Warner user capped at 250 GB monthly could expect to get about 4 hours per day of gaming assumed they used their cable modem connection for nothing else -- no iTunes, no Netflix streaming, no YouTubing or Facebooking...
And connection quality is just the beginning of OnLive's problems, the rest of which I don't have the time to get into. But assuming OnLive doesn't dissolve into vaporware now that its first-day-launch lovefest is over, I'm eager to try it out -- and tear it apart if fails to deliver.
Beyond the hype of OnLive
By Stanley A. Miller II of the Journal Sentinel
Mar. 25, 2009 12:07 p.m.
A new online gaming service called OnLive announced yesterday it will launch a product this year that will stream high-games over the Net to even low-end computers, a new model that some claim will challenge the big players in gaming like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. You can read the story from USA Today, or what is essentially regurgitated public-relations garbage from Gamespot if you want more details on it.
I was immediately skeptical of the startup, but other assignments prevented me from ranting about it until now:
OnLive has signed up some big publishers to sell games over their network, but I'm wary of their thin-client model. Despite the blue-sky "wave of the future" cloud-computing hype OnLive is using to market their wares, what many of game "journalists" failed to spotlight yesterday is that you need to have a really fast, consistent Internet connection.
Most people aren't lucky enough to have FIOS. The problem with OnLive's model is that if games become more advanced -- and of course they will -- that means more data that needs to be pushed to a server. And because it's streamed over the Net, it will be cracked within a matter of days, and there will be plenty of denial-of-service attacks from hackers. So OnLive will need to encrypt their streams (at least a 1024 bit key), which will require hardware on the other end to decrypt, which will slow things down as it decrypts on the fly.
The company claims users will be able to play streamed games via OnLive with no lag as long as their Internet connections meet minimum thresholds. For standard-definition play, that would mean a minimum 1.5 Mbps connection, and for high-definition, 5 Mbps.
Frankly, I am lucky to get 5 MBps, and that is only on good days. Plus, most ISPs have a cap of 60 GB to 100 GB a month. If you need to push 5 Mbps, that means you push 625KB a second. If you sustain that rate of transfer, you could run out your cap in about 27 hours. Now granted you won't usually sustain that much, but that is the theoretical math.
Perhaps a better example: At the 5 Mbps OnLive requires for HD gaming, a Time Warner user capped at 250 GB monthly could expect to get about 4 hours per day of gaming assumed they used their cable modem connection for nothing else -- no iTunes, no Netflix streaming, no YouTubing or Facebooking...
And connection quality is just the beginning of OnLive's problems, the rest of which I don't have the time to get into. But assuming OnLive doesn't dissolve into vaporware now that its first-day-launch lovefest is over, I'm eager to try it out -- and tear it apart if fails to deliver.