OnLive - The future of Gaming

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Assassin Xaero

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Stormz said:
If Onlive or Steam is the future I won't buy game anymore.
What's wrong with Steam? The fact that you can't sell your games? That is a PC issue, not a Steam issue.
 

Arafiro

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I bloody well hope not, OnLive is a terrible idea.

Maybe in a century or more, when everyone has internet that can stream realtime and the general rights of consumers in the economic environment are gone, but not now.
 

Kopikatsu

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Assassin Xaero said:
Stormz said:
If Onlive or Steam is the future I won't buy game anymore.
What's wrong with Steam? The fact that you can't sell your games? That is a PC issue, not a Steam issue.
It's akin to you-must-be-online-to-play-single-player DRM. (There is an offline mode, but if you go without being connected to the internet for like two hours, Steam will freak out because it's afraid there is an update it isn't getting.)
 

Get_A_Grip_

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I don't see OnLive kicking off in Ireland for the next few years. The average download speed is less than kb/s and most ISPs have a download limit of around 10 - 40 GB a month.
 

Assassin Xaero

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Kopikatsu said:
Assassin Xaero said:
Stormz said:
If Onlive or Steam is the future I won't buy game anymore.
What's wrong with Steam? The fact that you can't sell your games? That is a PC issue, not a Steam issue.
It's akin to you-must-be-online-to-play-single-player DRM. (There is an offline mode, but if you go without being connected to the internet for like two hours, Steam will freak out because it's afraid there is an update it isn't getting.)
Since when? They has the server blocked at my college and I never had a problem with playing in offline mode all the time.
 

DazZ.

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Jun 4, 2009
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I want my hardware running the games I'm playing. I don't own consoles because of how locked down the systems are and this is taking it even further.

Never playing on Onlive, it'll be a sad sad time if this ever becomes the only option (which it won't)
 

Kopikatsu

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Assassin Xaero said:
Kopikatsu said:
Assassin Xaero said:
Stormz said:
If Onlive or Steam is the future I won't buy game anymore.
What's wrong with Steam? The fact that you can't sell your games? That is a PC issue, not a Steam issue.
It's akin to you-must-be-online-to-play-single-player DRM. (There is an offline mode, but if you go without being connected to the internet for like two hours, Steam will freak out because it's afraid there is an update it isn't getting.)
Since when? They has the server blocked at my college and I never had a problem with playing in offline mode all the time.
You must be lucky, then. Every time I try to use it, it'll keep telling to go online and check for updates. Every. Single. Time.
 

NickCaligo42

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IzisviAziria said:
soren7550 said:
The future of gaming is as it was: Retail hard copies.
I wish you were right. I do. It's really too bad that you're not.

Digital distribution is skyrocketing. I know more people that bought Skyrim on steam than at a store. It's easier, you get the same product, and with steam, a lot of the time you get a great deal on it too. There's a lot of incentive to buy digitally now.

For the record, I bought Skyrim Collectors Ed, so definitely no digital copy here.
I picked it up on Steam, myself, but not because I wanted to. I did so because I went to Best Buy, looked at the PC copy on the shelf, and saw "Games for Windows Live" on the cover. "Fuck that shit," I said, so I went home and begrudgingly bought the Steam version.

Even the hard copies on the bloody shelves aren't really hard copies on the shelves--they're content and registration codes for other online distribution services. It's a horrible pain in the ass, too, because most of them are crap and don't work. Case in point, I got Fallout 3 GOTY edition a while back, hard copy, Games for Windows; damn thing just doesn't run. It doesn't even give me an error message or anything, it just quits to desktop as soon as I hit "start" from the launcher. I get Fallout 3 on Steam? It works fine.

Fuckin' publishers are gonna drag us into this nonsense kicking and screaming.

As for OnLive, I don't buy it's going to take off. Nobody's internet connection is ever going to be stable enough for this to be viable, not because transfer speeds won't be quick enough--but because most ISPs are going to continue offering horrible, unreliable service for the next hundred years.
 

Assassin Xaero

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Kopikatsu said:
Assassin Xaero said:
Kopikatsu said:
Assassin Xaero said:
Stormz said:
If Onlive or Steam is the future I won't buy game anymore.
What's wrong with Steam? The fact that you can't sell your games? That is a PC issue, not a Steam issue.
It's akin to you-must-be-online-to-play-single-player DRM. (There is an offline mode, but if you go without being connected to the internet for like two hours, Steam will freak out because it's afraid there is an update it isn't getting.)
Since when? They has the server blocked at my college and I never had a problem with playing in offline mode all the time.
You must be lucky, then. Every time I try to use it, it'll keep telling to go online and check for updates. Every. Single. Time.
It did say only fully-updated games would work, so there may have been an update, but how it would know is beyond me.
 

MarsProbe

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Dec 13, 2008
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The only thing I know (and want to know) about OnLive are that I have to skip that awful "What is OnLive?" ad for every third youtube video I watch.

Go away OnLive, nobody loves you really.

I'll stick with good old-fashioned hard copies thank you very much.
 

RhombusHatesYou

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NickCaligo42 said:
I picked it up on Steam, myself, but not because I wanted to. I did so because I went to Best Buy, looked at the PC copy on the shelf, and saw "Games for Windows Live" on the cover. "Fuck that shit," I said, so I went home and begrudgingly bought the Steam version.
Go see an optometrist because you were seeing words that aren't there... specifically 'Live'.

Skyrim on PC uses Steam/Steamworks not GFWL.
 

Baldr

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Jan 6, 2010
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mitchell271 said:
But what about modding? e.g. If I play Deus Ex, I'm going to install mods.
Give it time, cloud is still new. They want to put tools on the cloud, but it going to take time.
 

RhombusHatesYou

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Sampler said:
As I said, don't think about how you're internet is now but where it's going.
I find your optimism heartwarming yet amusing... like a puppy attacking it's own tail.

For a lot of people their access to communications infrastructure is shit and will remain shit until it reaches crisis point - ie, more profitable for communications companies to actually improve things instead of gouging the consumer on the grounds of resource scarcity.
 

Elsarild

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The future of console gaming, maybe, but I think I'm going to go with the future of casual gaming.

Speaking as a person who tested OnLive before it went live, and I've tested it from time to time since it's launch, I'm impressed, but as others have stated, it isn't suitable for PC, because you can't use mods, atleast not yet, and upwards of 10% of america still has no internet, and America still is a pretty sucky country when it comes to internet connection and speed compared to most of europe, and with a program like OnLive, a reasonably fast and steady connection is a must. And I also hardly doubt it's going to be picked up by people who play competetively.

But sure, give it a shot, but the future of gaming? I hardly doubt it.

not to think about people who has download limits on their connections, I don't have any numbers on how much data a normal play session would typically send, but playing a game just 5 hours a day, isn't going to be cheap.
 

veloper

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All these things and lag, in singleplayer even.

We need more than higher bandwidth in the future if this scheme is going to work properly. Latency needs to be cut.

Even then I question the economics of moving all the hardware to a central server. Fast consumer hardware is so cheap because the masses are buying. If the market for consumer hardware collapses and only big streaming companies are buying, they'll be paying fortunes for their hardware again like in the good old days. The end consumer will end up paying more.
 

Something Amyss

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Dec 3, 2008
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Sampler said:
Piracy - gone, no draconian DRM required, no fancy hardware tricks to keep the tinkerers out.
And if you think people were pissed off about always on DRM in Assassin's Creed, wait until they realise this is always on DRM for every game they own.

Online play - no more trouble with ping between machines as all interactions are calculated on the same server farm, the only lag you have to worry about is in the video stream to you, and if my experiences so far in Batmans single player mode is that's not an issue.
My experiences with one game give me a perfect experience with which to judge the entirety of the system.

This works perfectly on my consumer broadband at a peak time right now and broadband speeds are only going to increase and we're already seeing caps/limits being removed.
Maybe in the UK, but not in the states. We're seeing caps instated. Limits decreased.

I even read that the next Xbox will have a cheap Arm CPU and run Windows 9 and Xbox Live will morph into an OnLive cum Netflix area - you have a fully functioning computer and gaming device in one package and it costs less than a "decent" graphics card?
I'd judge the final product by the rumours before it's even announced, too. Brilliant strategy.

Yes there will be service outages, yes they'll probably be a few groan initiating dumb moves as we step towards this but it's no worse than red rings or yellow lights of death we have now,
Red Rings and Yellow Lights aren't system-wide outages.

PSN hacks or what-have you
I'm curious as to how this system won't be hacked. Seriously, enlighten me.

But mark my words peeps, OnLive is where it'll be - a service where everyone benefits (except maybe the Pirates, well guys, you had a good innings?)
And people in rural areas. And people without internet.

I'm sure they'll be a few comments along the lines of "my internets not good enough" etc.. but I'm not talking about right now, you're internet will get better, there's a lot of people who will make a lot of money by it doing so so believe me, there's investments being made.
My internet has only gotten worse over the years. Additionally, there is little incentive for an American company to actually improve their service. It costs a lot to do that and will eat into those financial statements that are the lifeblood of an American corporation.
 

Gennadios

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soren7550 said:
The future of gaming is as it was: Retail hard copies.
Yeah, that's why more and more retailers are going out of business with each quarter. I heard similar things said about music CD's a few years ago.
 
Mar 9, 2010
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Sampler said:
Publishers are going to love it, it's where it's going to go.
In the same sense that a prostitute loves that guy over there. You see him? He's with all the other guys with money.

Publishers go to whoever can get them money, if there's a good market for something then they'll sell to them. Thing is that Microsoft and Sony bring in fuck loads of money compared to OnLive and they do it almost instantly with a small trail off, which is what publishers really want. OnLive brings in money the same way you can fill your cup up with the drips from taps, you'll get it eventually but you won't be as satisfied as if you had just turned the tap on.

Realistically speaking people are going to continue buying from Microsoft and Sony for their consoles, they plug them in and play and they seem far cheaper. OnLive may be cheaper in the first place but people soon realise that they have to pay that subscription each month if they want their games, granted they get them all but they still have to make sure that payment is kept. On top of that, they have to keep up the broadband payment which rules out people not on an unlimited plan and even then it's sketchy that they'll get the game the quality they would want.

To put it bluntly OnLive simply just doesn't cut it. It has great potential but to put all your eggs in that basket is a poor decision. Microsoft and Sony will maintain control over this for generations, the future may not definitely be hard-copies but it sure as shit won't be OnLive, whatever benefits you may say it has.
 

Stormz

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Assassin Xaero said:
Stormz said:
If Onlive or Steam is the future I won't buy game anymore.
What's wrong with Steam? The fact that you can't sell your games? That is a PC issue, not a Steam issue.
I've said it dozens of times on this site. Being forced to have your games linked to an account. What if your hacked? or banned? You lose 100s of dollars of games that you supposedly owned. You don't own your steam games and you never will. Our ISPs here in Canada are also greedy ass holes so our internet is terrible. We can't afford to download a 10GB game from the internet.