My last reaction was, how do they bill for this, if you pay £30/month for usage, how does that pay the game publisher? Surely they prefer £30 per game, rather than 50p/month. That especially goes for Photoshop, surely they can't charge usage fees equivalent to £500-600?
We had this in the OnLive thread, it's important to remember this does not replace PC gaming, it's a suplement.Its impressive, but....
Modding games will be out the window, which to me modding is one of the best things about PC gaming, tweaking stuff, making new models, textures, maps etc. Obviously graphics/performance tweaks won't be needed if it's streaming from a powerful server but the rest, how will they accomodate that? I would guess if this takes off then Devs will close out modding altogether, so we are stuck with the base game.
It is just a streaming video, it can be used on virtually anything that can stream video.It'll still have to be developed on a multitude of devices as, no doubt, there would be competitors in this field rather than just one.
People would still want to play it on there PC as well.
What about offline? The single players on there (such as Spore / Mariokart / etc) all have offline functionality.
It is just a streaming video, it can be used on virtually anything that can stream video.
He played a number of offline games in that vid, it doesn't matter if you play on or off.
Oh well yes, you need a connection. You said those games have offline functionality, that's why I picked up on it.Not if you're offline it can't be played. Still needs a net connection of some kind. Of course through Virgin TV, etc. maybe possible.
M.
We had this in the OnLive thread, it's important to remember this does not replace PC gaming, it's a suplement.
A valid point, and one of the other concerns that makes this whole venture seem dangerous. However, it's not as cut and dry as 'one PC to a user' (I'm talking about OnLive here). Depending on what game the box is dedicated to, it can handle multiple users at the same time. While it's still a significant investment, OnLive seem confident they can handle demand. "Cut off" points may be inevitable though (Lyon speculates).But nobody will pay twice for the same game, one to play at home and one for browser play.
Unless you can input your licence key from the retail copy into this service, it will be quite expensive for "some fun at lunch time".
Plus the infrastructure would have to be huge. If 200 people logged on, the company would need 200 separate high spec PCs to allow everyone in. If 500 people decide to come on, they need 500 PCs. If this take off worldwide, they would need an infrastructure of say 50,000 high spec PCs, so initial outlay would be $50 million just for the PCs
Otherwise if they limit number of PCs available, people will get wuite annoyed having payed, not being able to play.
This is why the simple browser games make more sense, because each server can run multiple users simultaneously.