Actually quite excited !!

[Sleepery]

The whole bandwidth thing doesn't bother me as such. It's more the fact that :

I no longer own the game, so have no control over it

- I have to accept patches, whether I like what they do to the game or not.

- the game can be removed at any time. Want to play that game from a few years ago that you really like? Chances are it's been deleted to make way for something more recent, along with your savegame.

- What if some moron in government decides your favourite game is unfit for general consumption? It gets switched off, and you can't exactly keep the copy you bought before the ban. The Aussies would adore this.

- You can absolutely bet you'll be served ads in some form, at some point, and there'll be no way to mod them out. At least they'll be based on the kinds of game you play, since they'll be keeping all that data too.

- Game mods. Well, good luck with that

- it's a monopoly. At the moment I can get BFBC2 for a variety of prices from a variety of places. If it's released exclusively on this service, you'll pay what they tell you, or you won't play the game.

 

[Pyroblaze]

Well lucky you. Sadly if you lived in the UK you would understand. There is a lot of ISPs out in there but hardly any of them deliver what they say they can.

I am meant to have a 16mb line with unlimited dls. I get the unlimited dls but I only see maybe 6mb of that line (if that) at peak times that will drop to 3-4mb because naturally more people are using it. Can I control that ? no Can the ISP control that ? I dunno but I think the answer will be no.

Once we all have fibre lines all will be grand till then bugger it to hell.

The way things are looking i'd say broadband is about to change significantly over the next couple of years in the UK.

You've got virgin rolling out 100mb later in the year and are currently trialing 200mb, plus they've just unveiled another new trial of a 50mb sevice over telegraph poles today http://pressoffice.virginmedia.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=205406&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1401380&highlight=. BT are going fibre and giving up to 40mb, god knows what else is planned for this year and next but at least things are showing signs of change.

 

[Shamikebab]

The way things are looking i'd say broadband is about to change significantly over the next couple of years in the UK.

You've got virgin rolling out 100mb later in the year and are currently trialing 200mb, plus they've just unveiled another new trial of a 50mb sevice over telegraph poles today http://pressoffice.virginmedia.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=205406&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1401380&highlight=. BT are going fibre and giving up to 40mb, god knows what else is planned for this year and next but at least things are showing signs of change.

Where though? Where I live we can technically get 4.5mb but in reality it rarely exceeds 2. The fact is the UK does not have the infrastructure to support this service.

 

[craig3000]

The way things are looking i'd say broadband is about to change significantly over the next couple of years in the UK.

You've got virgin rolling out 100mb later in the year and are currently trialing 200mb, plus they've just unveiled another new trial of a 50mb sevice over telegraph poles today http://pressoffice.virginmedia.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=205406&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1401380&highlight=. BT are going fibre and giving up to 40mb, god knows what else is planned for this year and next but at least things are showing signs of change.

LOL virgin are the worst example of providing a good internet service, it's all great and fantastic that their rolling out these new 100-200 supposed services but the fact is their throttling is awful and cable is not direct to your house in most cases, the reason they throttle is because as said the infastructure is not their. So you play your onlive game for an hour in 720p and use a GB of bandwidth, they will likely throttle you for the rest of the day, fun?

BT control the cabling within england if I'm correct? Most of this is still copper and so far as I'm aware BT have started upgrading this to fibre optic but this is the whole country and we're in the biggest recession since jesus was born, it will take ages for them to get everybody on cable, even the most populated of places will be a long time before they receive a true cable service

 

[Gimpymoo]

What i do not understand is that it is in no way cheaper

If you have to pay £10 a month then even after 2 years you have spent the same amount as the price of a ps3/360 elite e.t.c.

and normally consoles go on for 4/5 years or more.

I don't see how this is in anyway better than what we already have.

I thought the £10 a month included game access too?

EDIT: Corrected

OnLive will be available for a monthly rental fee of $14.95 (£9.99) for subscribers to then buy or rent games over the internet.

 

[Uriel]

If this thread is going to be for onlive discussion can we have a sensible title please (via mod change).

Nothing in "Actually quite excited" to indicate what the thread is about.

 

[snowdog]

Console & pc killer ?


Laggy POS...

People here don't like it when they lose a few frames from 60, how can they like a service which takes 50-100ms to respond to your controls ?

 

[Talrinys]

Well lucky you. Sadly if you lived in the UK you would understand. There is a lot of ISPs out in there but hardly any of them deliver what they say they can.

I am meant to have a 16mb line with unlimited dls. I get the unlimited dls but I only see maybe 6mb of that line (if that) at peak times that will drop to 3-4mb because naturally more people are using it. Can I control that ? no Can the ISP control that ? I dunno but I think the answer will be no.

Once we all have fibre lines all will be grand till then bugger it to hell.

That is still the fault of your ISP and not this service though. I'm not convinced this can pay off for them, but if they focus the service in areas with high fibre penetration, i can easily see this being a huge market.

I do understand though, i am not one of the lucky people in Denmark with fibre connection. That means i have a 20/1mb line which only ever delivers 14mbps down, and is also quite unstable. I would not use this service, ever. But just a few kilometers from here people in Sweden have an enormous fibre penetration. If they place a datacenter in the middle of Sweden for instance the ping to Sweden would be neglible, and that is what really matters. It's not as unbelievable as people think.

 

[craig3000]

It's not as unbelievable as people think.

I think it's pretty unbelievable

 

[Sleepery]

Laggy POS...

People here don't like it when they lose a few frames from 60, how can they like a service which takes 50-100ms to respond to your controls ?

People here don't constitute the whole of the market. Millions of people were happy to play Mass Effect on the xbox despite the awful frame rates and 5-seconds-later texture pop-in.

Not endorsing the service, just point out the flaw in your logic.

 

[craig3000]

People here don't constitute the whole of the market. Millions of people were happy to play Mass Effect on the xbox despite the awful frame rates and 5-seconds-later texture pop-in.

Not endorsing the service, just point out the flaw in your logic.

haha I wouldn't say they were happy with it lol, the only reason I carried on playing Mass Effect was because of the story, the gameplay itself was ok and the frame rates and texture popins were just annoying, so I'd say people put up with it but weren't happy with it

As for Mass Effect 2 I have no problems with performance or visuals and the gameplay is much more engaging

 

[Pyroblaze]

Some of you are talking as though this new tech is aimed at us PC gamers, seems to me it's more aimed at the console market. Somewhere they might not be as successful as they'd like it to be. I mean, console games are already overly expensive for parents to buy their children frequently so i can see them viewing this with scepticism, a monthly sub and having to buy the games.

 

[craig3000]

Some of you are talking as though this new tech is aimed at us PC gamers, seems to me it's more aimed at the console market. Somewhere they might not be as successful as they'd like it to be. I mean, console games are already overly expensive for parents to buy their children frequently so i can see them viewing this with scepticism, a monthly sub and having to buy the games.

I would say it was aimed at both, more so consoles but they like to point out frequently that, 'it will run your games even on old computers' so they are trying to appeal to PC but more the casual pc owners that are likely to have slower computers

It doesn't matter it would still have a massive knock on effect to pc gaming and eventually we as pc gamers would have to move to the service, I think Onlive themselves may get slaughtered when Sony and Microsoft get something together, they have the money and the ability to get things done quickly, Microsoft is also great with the software side of things

 

[Sleepery]

If it's aimed at console users they'll most likely have to buy some kind of set top box too, I can't see Sony / Microsoft allowing their consoles to be used as thin clients.

 

[apatia77]

You just all complain that there will be lag etc but this has been in development for 8 years and surely they must have tested this extensively from different locations in the world. It probably won't be perfect for games such as fps or games that require nano second timings but there are plenty of games where this could work just fine, like most console games anyway.

I recon this service will just end up being too expensive and don't forget our bad quality broadband.

 

[FoxEye]

How is it too early? The UK and US are lagging way behind in broadband capabilities but it won't be long until we catch up. One of my mates went to Hong Kong for a funeral recently, he was staying with an aunt who knows bugger all about computers yet had a 1GB line. 100MB is being rolled out here this year then 200MB soon after, with them arriving and BT ramping up to 40mb (knowing BT it will be crap at first though) competition has to start heating up soon.

"Knowing BT" as you say you do, you shouldn't expect anything near 1GB in the next decade, in the UK.

In 5 years time we might have 100mb. Might. It won't be BT driving it forwards, however, it'll be someone like Virgin or TT or whoever. BT will be happily sitting on their feet, as always, counting their money piles.

As for OnLive... I give them 6 months before filing for bankruptcy. Way too soon for this kind of service.

 

[Sean_UK]

Irrc the national average speeds around 2.5mb for home users, even lower at peak times so this is doomed to fail within UK...

 

[maxilive]

I would love to try this out I'm lucky to have 20mb so it wouldn't touch my connection and for most people if you can stream iplayer you could probably stream this as it's more reliant on ping rather than download speed (bad 720p resolution).

I think the tech must work reasonably well (not to our leet gaming standards) as a large amount of developers have jumped on board and not just for the gaming service but for much faster rendering without them having to buy their own servers etc. I think the guy behind Onlive is basically trying to sell the Codec/hardware decoding that only takes 1ms which is very impressive when you considering it is doing it live with minimal artefacts. I think he used to work for Apple and helped develop quicktime back in the day so he has got some knowledge on this kind of stuff.

I do believe OnLive has a future but it isn't for us enthusiastic PC gamers as we complain with 1-2 fps drops due to lame drivers. There is a huge market out there who like to play the latest games casually but are sitting on a P4 pc and wouldn't want to invest the time and money us enthusiasts do. The problem with this is the probably haven't got a clue how capable their internet connection is and will probably have loads of issues with traffic shaping, packet loss, disconnections, port forwarding (maybe) and generally slow speeds at times which will tarnish OnLive service.

I hope it does go well for them as I would like to see what this tech can do in the future as you could easily see live updates/fixes straight from developers and vastly improved graphics plus features. There is a lot of downsides but I wouldn't worry about it too much guys as I doubt Steam/Retail discs will be overthrown by this any time soon

 

[Sleepery]

If they've any sense there's probably a speed test built into the signup process, it would save them a lifetime of hassle.

 

[Spektor]

how can they like a service which takes 50-100ms to respond to your controls ?

You get latencies in the tens of milliseconds within your own PC when you have lots of different parts of a game engine rendering and responding at different rates but have to synchronize together, leaves most of it having to wait.

But on the technology, I'm massively excited about this, it's definitely the future of gaming. But I worry about my tiring ADSL connection only getting 3.5Mbps, two gaming PCs here to so that would be split between them, even with ADSL2 coming here later this year I'm not expecting that to even come close to doubling

So yeah, can't wait for it, but not expecting it to be reliable enough to switch to for most people for a very long time unless USA / UK seriously shape up on their broadband infrastructures.