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Actually quite excited !!

I really don't like this, it's utter DRM and you never actually own the game, you just rent it all the time.

I'd rather have the power in my hands than in some remote server's hands. This is pretty much going backwards.
 
There seem to be quite a few people who don't know anything about OnLive, and are just dismissing them out of hand.

This is not a fly-by-night operation. This is a serious attempt to become the de facto cloud computing gaming system.

Considering the amount that people spend on their Xbox Gold membership, I don't see why they shouldn't make serious inroads into the console gaming market. Spending a little a month is no big deal, look at WOW.

No, it won't be coming to the UK anytime soon, but they don't need us. They have the rest of the world to make money from.

And anyway, I'm a PC gamer, so I won't be touching it with a bargepole, but I'm sure there will be plenty of console gamers that will.
 
Jezcentral said:
There seem to be quite a few people who don't know anything about OnLive, and are just dismissing them out of hand.

This is not a fly-by-night operation. This is a serious attempt to become the de facto cloud computing gaming system.

Considering the amount that people spend on their Xbox Gold membership, I don't see why they shouldn't make serious inroads into the console gaming market. Spending a little a month is no big deal, look at WOW.

No, it won't be coming to the UK anytime soon, but they don't need us. They have the rest of the world to make money from.

And anyway, I'm a PC gamer, so I won't be touching it with a bargepole, but I'm sure there will be plenty of console gamers that will.
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Price isn't the big issue, 'rest of world' = US and this was on N4G.com, most of the comments were 'I like my playstation' etc etc, I don't hate the idea, it's inevitable that every single device we use in the future will be shrunk and networked together and cloud servers will help to power these devices but it's just too early, you can say 'they've been planning this for years' but business and ideas mess up no matter what planning has gone into it or not, when you put it in the real world you never know what will happen, there's just a lot of ways this could fall flat on it's face is all

US internet is just as crippled as the UK's as well

This is interesting: http://thenextweb.com/uk/2010/01/31/conservatives-promise-nationwide-100-meg-broadband-2017/

Obviously still a long way off
 
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When they come to do a Christmas 'biggest flops in history' TV show in 2059. I get the feeling this will be at the top.

Can't see it working at all.
 
The latency will just cripple you.

We're not talking about the simple latency between you and a server, it'll be latency between you and your mouse/keyboard (Which gaming peripherals try to eliminate), and then add on the latency of the actual servers between that too if you play online.

It certainly seems like it could be a hit, but until the internet develops further to 100Mb or 200Mb lines which nearly every home owner can afford, I can't see it being viable simply because the lag of games and such, unless infact they have local servers to accommodate for game servers, at which point the lag between the machine and the server would effectively be 0, which means the latency would be roughly the same as it is now, it depends how they develop it.
 
So basically I rent games that are installed on server miles away and the VGA/DVI cable is basically the internet :confused:

No way this sounds dodgey not to mention the massive lag incurred with this.
I'd rather get a console than get this (speaking as a PC gamer)!

I'm actually scared that people might actually fall for this and limit proper "localized" gaming as it should be. What is the world coming to?
 
It might be ok for simple games on controller but as everyone has said the latencies are going to kill it dead - they had to patch killzone IIRC because it had built in 130ms input lag and even the casual players hated it... theres no way with the technical details of this system that input latency will be under 100ms on most peoples connections and probably closer to 150ms unless they have a very good realtime encoder.

You have to remember with most online games the client uses prediction clientside to reduce input latency at worst your talking 20ms (unless your screwing with vsync that can get it over 30ms easy)... probably sub 10ms on a decent high end PC with framerates over 60.
 
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craig3000 said:
Price isn't the big issue, 'rest of world' = US and this was on N4G.com, most of the comments were 'I like my playstation' etc etc, I don't hate the idea, it's inevitable that every single device we use in the future will be shrunk and networked together and cloud servers will help to power these devices but it's just too early, you can say 'they've been planning this for years' but business and ideas mess up no matter what planning has gone into it or not, when you put it in the real world you never know what will happen, there's just a lot of ways this could fall flat on it's face is all

US internet is just as crippled as the UK's as well

This is interesting: http://thenextweb.com/uk/2010/01/31/conservatives-promise-nationwide-100-meg-broadband-2017/

Obviously still a long way off
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Again you're, sorry to say, naively dismissing this because of your stance towards broadband penetration in the UK. Dismissing technology because of your country's terrible choice of politicians and companies in this regards (just at the danish public chooses incompetent science ministers) when you should be dismissing the possibilities for this to be optimized is severely missing the point. Performing initial testing and deployment in areas with high fibre penetration would allow for this business model to be tested.

The main issue is not ping but rather the cost of the servers that would run these games.

To the point of monopoly - only if no competitors enter this market, which naturally they will if this proves to be scalable.
 
I can't stand the lag from enabling vsync so I cannot see how this can work anytime soon. It doesn't matter how many mbps they give me I don't see any way around the latency issue :rolleyes: Online FPS games only work due to client side prediction and I don't see how that is possible with their planned system. I even remember playing Quake pre-prediction and it felt like ice skating :D
Certainly some game types would be playable but can you imagine playing something like Unreal Tournament or Street Fighter IV?
 
as stated, lag in single player games, oooh goody. As for killing off pc gaming, i dont think so.

If your the sort of person who only buys the odd game like me, why would you want to buy the game for what will no doubt be inflated prices as found on steam, so say £40-50 in relation to console game prices, and then pay £10 a month to play it, so if i play that game for 3 months £80, when games develop further and require better hardware server side the price hikes will start.

Seem like its ok as an option but as a soul solution its a bad idea. problem is game producers will push for this type of solution as it will be perfect to abolish piracy.

wont even save that much money with pc's as we will still have these machines to browse/work photo-shop on etc.
 
I think something like onlive will be the way forward. The concept is great, Why shell out for a console which will eventually be replaced, aswell as buying games you can rent them, ie pay an amount to rent a game for a week, this would be great for single player games that you just would not normally buy at full price. I can totally see that in some point in the future this will be THE way to play games.

I think OnLive itself will be a test ground one that will have big teething problems. The obvious 2 are broadband infrastructure. I don't know what its like in America but the UK certainly does not have the broadband infrastructure. I can download at 2.4Mb/sec but i think that is not the case for the masses at all. Even my cable ISP throttles P2P downloading at peak hours as it does not have the capacity. The second is pricing. I think the current pricing is ok for casual players who just play a spot on the weekends and some evenings. While for the hardcore gamer it might make sense for single player games that you just play through once but i can not imagine renting a multiplayer shooter (i have racked up over 300 hours on mw2) or a game like civ4 which has consumed even more time.

If the broadband structre can cope in America i think this service would appeal to casual gamers and could actually have a decent take up.

I worry about the price, they use rack mounted PCs to 'process' the games, even though the computers are used near 100% of the time for a lot of users this still sounds like an expensive infrastructure. Every 6 months they plan to add new hardware to run the latest most demanding games.

IMO this will be the way we play games in the future, i am not sure we are ready yet though!
 
I'll believe it when I see it, but not a bad idea, it just is really hard to do. And by the way all this UK internet bashing is a load of dross, we areally arn't that mcuh worse than most other countries apart from the odd place where the government has just thrown money at fibre.
 
There are two major stumbling blocks, bandwidth and latency, as with any network connection,

Say you can get a ping of 50ms, which is damn good really, that's 100ms (ping is a one-way thing) on top of what you'd get playing natively on a pc, that's easily enough to be noticeable.

Secondly bandwidth, they say 5Mbps for 720p with audio, now assuming 720p at 60fps the bitrate of the raw image will be ~1700Mbps, so that's some ridiculously good compression to be doing in 1ms. Even bluray allows 40Mbps for the video alone, admittedly thats 1080p so ~2.16x more pixels than 720, but even then that's several times more bitrate than OnLive are claiming are needed for 720p + audio + software overhead...

I can see the compression having fairly major artifacting/quality issues frankly.

And then there's the cost, if the £9.99 a month included any game then fine, but it appears that buying or renting the game is on top of that (and if it's 'bought' is it actually bought or do you need to keep paying for OnLive?). This makes it an expensive proposition really, 'enthusiast' gamers like us generally won't want it due to the quality/latency issues, whilst a lot of casual gamers won't want to pay out a tenner a month on top of playing games.
 
SKILL said:
There are two major stumbling blocks, bandwidth and latency, as with any network connection,

Say you can get a ping of 50ms, which is damn good really, that's 100ms (ping is a one-way thing) on top of what you'd get playing natively on a pc, that's easily enough to be noticeable.

Secondly bandwidth, they say 5Mbps for 720p with audio, now assuming 720p at 60fps the bitrate of the raw image will be ~1700Mbps, so that's some ridiculously good compression to be doing in 1ms. Even bluray allows 40Mbps for the video alone, admittedly thats 1080p so ~2.16x more pixels than 720, but even then that's several times more bitrate than OnLive are claiming are needed for 720p + audio + software overhead...

I can see the compression having fairly major artifacting/quality issues frankly.

And then there's the cost, if the £9.99 a month included any game then fine, but it appears that buying or renting the game is on top of that (and if it's 'bought' is it actually bought or do you need to keep paying for OnLive?). This makes it an expensive proposition really, 'enthusiast' gamers like us generally won't want it due to the quality/latency issues, whilst a lot of casual gamers won't want to pay out a tenner a month on top of playing games.
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50ms ping is not very good, it's absolutely terrible. I can easily get pings of 20ms to local servers here in Denmark, and that's on ADSL. On Fibre you have only the theoretical limit of the speed of light + any processing. If the rumors are true that the max distance from customer to server will be 1000km, this will equate into a max of 5ms each way on fibre if done efficiently. Again, stop basing this on your own inadequate internet connection, when even parts of Africa are better at laying down high speed, low latency internet connections.
 
Hmm, don't know what to think about this.

Perhaps it will be ok for the uBeR games in the future but for me personally I like being able to mod/tweak/custom the game to how I like it. 9/10 I play are 5-15 years old anyway so it would be a bit pointless for me.
 
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