Onlive Uk working in the Uk

What Onlive is doing is trying to corner the market. They're basically offering a solution where by, due to how it's run, will mean no piracy.

The idea, delvier the games over video only, is a sound one it's just the connections are not up to it.

As others have commented, I spend money on my games and I want to play them whether I'm online or offline on the move, etc. so I wouldn't be using this service.



M.
 
m4cc45 said:
What Onlive is doing is trying to corner the market. They're basically offering a solution where by, due to how it's run, will mean no piracy.

The idea, delvier the games over video only, is a sound one it's just the connections are not up to it.
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Well its going to fail. Any competant marketing director or shareholder should be able to see that the internet infrastructure simply can't take it and until the lag becomes almost unnoticable, no sane gamer is EVER going to use it.
 
I live in Czech republic, someone would say "eastern europe", and I have 25mbit cable connection without any bandwidth cap for some 20 bucks - how come western countries have such a bad connections?

Anyway, I wonder when will be onlive available for whole europe.Next year maybe?
 
Well I just TRIED to play Darksiders on it but it was rather difficult. My monitors native res is 1900x1200 so it looked terrible and because there's no UK servers it was rather laggy to the point of being unplayable as the mouse input wasn't at all smooth.
 
I gave it a good go tonight. Played Borderlands and Assassin's Creed II. There were occasional stutters due to network issues but I was surprised at just how much lag there wasn't. The controls felt quite responsive. The graphics actually looked sharp and crisp, although I'm only on a 15" notebook. But otherwise, I was really impressed. I can't see me buying things on Steam if an OnLive version is available because I don't have to worry about whether my GPU can cope.
 
The problem with Onlive is going to be consumer confidence.

Are people really going to want to spend money on games without any tangible product? I know Steam is the same setup, but Valve were a behemoth before they launched Steam.

Onlive is a startup company that could fold within 6 months.
 
What I don't like is the way they handle the mouse in games, you move the mouse then it catches up with you, that sucks, I would much rather it move at my speed on screen but then have to wait 0.25 of a second to register the click than to try to move the mouse then wait for it to catch up with where I think it should be
 
NeoReloaded said:
Maybe in 5 years or so, but right now I can't see it taking off!
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I would say much longer than that. The government's big target for broadband being a minimum of 2Mbit coverage for the UK, which they are still nowhere near, and this service requires around double that in it's current form, if they improve the quality of the stream that will obviously go up. America's broadband infrastructure is pretty much in the same boat, vast divides in available speeds, some able to get 50Mbit+ connections fine, but a lot struggling on something barely describable as a dial-up.

Easily 10-20 years just before the majority of the people will be able to viably access a service like this, again thats in it's current form, no doubt at some point in the next 10-20 years the quality/bandwidth requirement will have increased. So without a big investment in broadband, particularly in America, these services are going to have an uphill struggle.

This is then leaving out the actual capacity of the networks we connect to, all those currently enjoying 20/50Mbit connections, if those were actually available to even a fraction more people the network capacities would be so saturated that you, nor they, would be getting decent speeds in any measure. Add to that ISPs restrictions, which can be a bit tyrannical today, if a large high bandwidth, constant streaming service took off, before they could have a chance to invest the vast time + finance to increase capacity, they would have to turn it into a despotic drip feed where everyone would be lucky to browse a few youtube videos a month.

All this is a massive shame, because services like these are amazing and could do so much for gaming. But they can't make it big with the current state of broadband and in making it big would cripple networks without super serious investment from private/public sectors, which thus far have shown that in the case of UK/US, just aren't willing to put any serious investment and set their mid-long term plans at rather pitiful upgrades. This plus the economy being in the rather ropey shape it's in, ultrafast broadband I doubt will be making the top of the list in any governments agendas for the foreseeable future.

So they will grow much bigger than they are now, just a shame nowhere near fast or big enough. But will be nice to see how they develop over the next few years. Will just have to hope some kind of broadband revolution occurs within the next decade :(
 
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I've just given Darksiders a go at this time of the morning.. Using a 360 controller the lag was barely noticeable.. It was difficult to tell the lag was there..
When I first used Onlive a few weeks ago I had the same message - latency etc etc.. And the only button I could press was exit.. But now for some reason the Continue button is highlighted and i'm able to start it up. If youre getting high latencies, try not to judge the product until it comes over here in the Uk (or europe at least), as it isn't designed to work smoothly over here yet. Theres no mentioning of it being compatible on their website, so just accept that its not going to work right over here just yet. For those judging Onlive negatively without giving it a go, for whatever reason - restrictions maybe? At least try the system out before bashing it. If those who cant afford a games console or a top pc can have access to this kind of service, even the demos.. and to play demos of the latest titles, then that alone would draw in an audience of intrigued future gamers. Once the demo ends those who enjoy the experience may go on to buy the game itself, which i assume is what Onlive are hoping. Imagine being able to fire up games in on the College computers or take your game with you to work (hell, I know some of you have been there..) It opens up new horizons and broadens where gaming can take place. Hence the interest.
 
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So that would roughly be 200ms-250ms lag constantly, anyone remember playing Half Life 1 with 500ping on 56k? :D

In the UK I would expect there to be 100-150ms lag which is fairly average for wider European and American online gaming servers, so compared to that it isn't that bad at all! It isn't going to take over the crazy competitive hardcore gamer but the guy who looks at the new batman game then says nah... I would need to spend either 150-200ish on a graphics card or buy a console this is the perfect solution.

Also Gakai is going to be out at the end of the years with rumours that it is going to be slightly speedier than onlive (not by much).
 
Evilsod said:
Well its going to fail. Any competant marketing director or shareholder should be able to see that the internet infrastructure simply can't take it and until the lag becomes almost unnoticable, no sane gamer is EVER going to use it.
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Agreed. The only thing I can think of them doing is having direct connections into there data centres with very low latency lines. Obviously this is going to push up the price.



M.
 
Evilsod said:
Well its going to fail. Any competant marketing director or shareholder should be able to see that the internet infrastructure simply can't take it and until the lag becomes almost unnoticable, no sane gamer is EVER going to use it.
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Yes, but the way to be successful is not to wait until the infrastructure is good enough to launch, but to already be there when it is. Otherwise, anyone could pile in when the time was right. As long as they have enough interest (either from customers or investors) to keep going, they will be well-placed when cloud gaming finally kicks in.

Steam was the same. It was too early when it launched, but when more people got broadband, it became the de facto pc gaming standard for digital distribution because it was already there and being used.
 
Jezcentral said:
Yes, but the way to be successful is not to wait until the infrastructure is good enough to launch, but to already be there when it is. Otherwise, anyone could pile in when the time was right. As long as they have enough interest (either from customers or investors) to keep going, they will be well-placed when cloud gaming finally kicks in.

Steam was the same. It was too early when it launched, but when more people got broadband, it became the de facto pc gaming standard for digital distribution because it was already there and being used.
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Broadband was already on the way before Steam was launched as far as i know. Besides, the content delivery itself may of originally been flawed if people were using dial up, but the games Steam really got started on were Valves own games that would generally be bought as retail, added to steam and installed locally.

But there is no way you can offer OnLive nationally much less globally and it'll be decades before its even feasible on a larger scale. How exactly are they going to hang on until then?
 
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