OnLive: The future of gaming is here

[Doc Theta Sigma]

Sounds like a good idea but there are two drawbacks I can see. One, not everyone has a high speed internet connection, and if the servers go down you're screwed. Two, the subscription fee. That's how they get you. This is going to be expensive, let's face it. I'd prefer to pay £40 a year for Xbox Live than a metric ton of cash for interactive video.

 

[itsmeyouidiot]

I just have a gut feeling that this is doomed to fail, probably because I fell for the Phantom hype and have since been a bit skeptical about new companies entering the console market. Hell, the only company that's been successful in entering the console market in the past 8-9 years has been Microsoft with the Xbox and Xbox 360, and possibly Apple with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Having all the games run on the same computers doesn't sound like a good idea. Plus, having the games be played on the computers at a centralized location means that playing any game requires an internet connection, and weaker connections could cause the game to lag and crash in the middle of a game. Plus, operating a console like this would likely require a costly subscription service, like cable TV.

 

[NoNameMcgee]

I can't see it being hugely popular just yet. As it stands, many countries do not have fast enough internet connections for this. For those that do have these kind of internet connections, 1.4MBPS is common, but with that you can only play the games in low quality video compression. Stretched to full screen that is not going to look good.. like stretching a youtube video to full screen. No thankyou, almost unplayable for most people. And playing it in a tiny window doesn't sound appealing either.

For the few people who actually have a 5MBPS internet connection, what about bandwith? We're talking about 720p quality video here which you guys will be able to stream. My estimate for that is around 4GB of your download bandwith for around 2 hours of gametime. Only people on Unlimited download quotas (and i'm talking TRUE unlimited, not where it slows your internet down after you reach a certain quota) will be able to use this effectively.

For someone like myself in australia, 2MBPS internet connections are about the norm, but we have terrible download quotas and unlimited is virtually non-existant, so using this service would be completely out of the question.

But in the future, when the norm actually is 5MBPS unlimited broadband for the majority of people, yes, this really could work, and is a very exciting prospect, because it means you would not have to upgrade your PC ever again or ever buy another console. I am still skeptical, however.

Still, I would miss mods.

 

[Yokomitsu]

Yer although it is not coming into australia because our internet is not strong enough

 

[Yoshimota]

Yer although it is not coming into australia because our internet is not strong enough

And will be even worse when Rudd puts all those filters in place!

Damn the government!

And I was looking forward to this and everything!

 

[Flishiz]

It's great on the outside, but when you think about it, the infrastructure of the internet is definitely not ready for this. Connections are not nearly fast enough to balance bandwidth, because even one user could be sucking the connection from many others under a single ISP. That plus, the ISPs will start charging higher rates or *gulp*, data-based contracts.

In short, it won't be viable until about 5-10 years from now.

 

[Renikor]

There's no "future of gaming" because developers are too lazy to make a psycotic virtual reality helmet that makes you shit rainbows. Put cool topic lol

 

[asiepshtain]

great idea, massive technical limits. However they did state that they will ship with US only support, so no real effect on most of us anyway.

 

[JediMB]

I'd rather not play my games with latency. Nor potential network issues, as having to deal with various kinds of DRM that ask for an Internet connection to play is bad enough.

 

[johnwedd]

i think i would like this as a local server based implementation. Where i can have a server in my closet on a gigabit ethernet connection. That way i can have it auto-update games, host game-save states,and what not. That way guys can come over with a netbook and play whats on my server. over the inter, well, i don't cotton much to that. i think i'm simply to biased towards old school distribution ideals.

 

[thiosk]

I see this as potentially the laggiest online experience ever devised. magic algorithims cannot change the fact that you need to transmit every command to a server, ask for computation time from the cloud, then bring it back, and unwrap the packets.

We'll see.