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Posted: **2009-03-25 06:23am**

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/200 ... live_N.htm

A new online video game distribution network hopes to free players from buying game discs or the console systems and high-priced computers needed to play them.

The OnLive Game Service, expected to launch later this year — and to be officially announced today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco — lets subscribers choose from a on-demand catalog of new video games that can be played on Windows and Apple Macintosh computers or television sets.

Bypassing current console systems such as the Microsoft Xbox that play only games made for that specific platform, OnLive lets computers play games stored on its network of super-powerful data servers. These servers bounce game data back and forth from the player's computer using proprietary compression technology to make the games run as if they are loaded on the computer.

To play over big-screen HDTVs, a small microconsole unit (the size of a deck of cards) that connects to home broadband networks is used. Game controllers and headsets can connect to the microconsole using USB or wireless connections.

As the first true virtual console, "OnLive shows the potential for a gaming world without consoles," says Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities. However, he says, if the service costs too much, it runs the risk of being like TiVo's digital video recorder — among the first DVRs but priced too high for mass acceptance. [...]The price of the microconsole needed for TV-based connectivity and monthly subscriptions will be announced later. (Those interested in participating in the testing of the system can sign up on http://www.onlive.com.)

Games such as Prince of Persia (Ubisoft), LEGO Batman (Warner) and Mirror's Edge (Electronic Arts) were among the 16 games to be shown as playable on the service. Supporting game publishers include Atari, Codemasters, Electronic Arts, Eidos, Epic Games, Take-Two Interactive Software, THQ, Ubisoft and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. OnLive does not offer classic video games, but does plan to explore back catalog titles in the future.

"Were providing you with the latest high-end titles, the exact same ones you would see at Target or Best Buy, in the same release windows. But what is really cool is you don't need any high-end hardware to play them," says OnLive founder and chief operating officer Steve Perlman. "There's no physical media. It's an all-digital platform. You never need to upgrade your equipment at home."

Compared to choosing which console system to buy or making costly upgrades to computers, OnLive represents a paradigm shift in game delivery that consumers may embrace. "You've got choice, you've got value and your performance is always state-of-the-art and you're getting all the best games," says OnLive chief operating officer Mike McGarvey.

And the system also makes sense for publishers currently forced to create multiple versions of games to be played across various platforms, he says. "We offer tremendous economics for the publishers because we are getting rid of a lot of the inefficiencies of the packaged goods business," says McGarvey, who formerly was CEO of Eidos. "Really, video games is one of the last digital frontiers in which at least the majority are not delivered through digital means. "

OnLive users have an online profile that saves the games they have rented or purchased and tracks their progress. Users can peruse the service to watch other games in process and connect with friends or other users for multiplayer sessions. Players can save "brag clips" of their best performances; those learning a game could watch more experienced players. "This gives you the ability to think of video games as television," Perlman says. "Anything is viewable."

Computer users will download a 1 megabyte Web browser plug-in that allows them to shop for games and use their profile. Once the games launch, they fill the screen with full resolution video. High-speed connections (five megabits per second or greater) allow for TV-based players to get high-definition-quality video.

Perlman, who previously helped develop QuickTime, WebTV and Moxi, spun Palo Alto, Calif.-based OnLive out of technology incubator firm Rearden. The system has been in development for seven years, and includes as investors Warner Bros., Auto Desk and Maverick Capital.

His previous work on multimedia settop boxes led Perlman to think "these boxes are just going to get bigger and bigger. … There must be a way to upgrade (video games) to get people out of this horrible console cycle," he says.

If OnLive can establish itself as a reliable and easy to use service, it has the potential "to compete with console games as interactive entertainment, and could have a very positive impact on high end PC games publishing," says Billy Pidgeon of research firm IDC. "The service would be an anti-piracy solution and would enable quality game play experiences without the cost of a game console or high performance PC."

Just read it but I cannot see it working without a really fast (and expensive) internet connection.

Your GAMEPAD input is send to a server which computes the graphics, physics and all the game internal stuff... and then sends the video output to your box.

High-definition video means to me a resolution of 1920x1080.
That is roughly 500kbyte per image (assuming jpeg compression) and for good quality gaming you need roughly 24 to 30 images per second to have a good gaming experience.

A 5 Mbit connection translates to approximately 625Kbyte/s as MAXIMUM. The average speed is below that. And 30x500kb equals 1500kbyte/s and thats just for the video feed.
What about the audio stream?

What about the people without the 5 Mbit/s connections?
Or those without a fixed price internet connection (german term for that would be "flatrate" but I'm not sure it's international)?

I can see this working for office applications which do not require a fast response time, but gaming?!

And while I consider myself to be open minded I dare to call this a futile attempt of the industry to gain total control over the gamer that will just add more useless traffic to the already stressed internet.

My rant is over now.

What's your oppinion?

P.S.: I believe this is my first thread. I'm so proud now.

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:21am**

I hate how people are acting like it'll sweep the gaming industry overnight and will automatically bring about a virtual Renaissance or some shit.

I mean, yeah, it's an impressive logical idea that certainly sounds cool on paper. We'll see how good it works when the servers get loaded up.

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:21am**

The real killer will be latency. Any game that requires fast response times (e.g. any FPS) simply will not be responsive enough to provide an enjoyable experience.

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:26am**

What are you talking about? FPS tards have become synonymous with over-internet multi fests. Does it bother them that they've got to put up with pings as it is? No.

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:29am**

It is an intrguing concept, but the technology is just not there yet.

What really bothers me is that despite claims that this service would allow for "gaming without consoles", in practice you're switching from Xbox/PS3/Wii/PC to OnLive, just as if it were another platform (wich it is).

On the other hand, the idea that by hosting all the software they are controlling the user is nothing new. Many high-profile publishers rely on DRM schemes that require online authentification, wich is pretty much the same, except you host the files on your own system.

If this catches on, though, it'll be another nail in the coffin of gaming as an evolving artform/entertainment, instead of an stagnating cesspool of hyper-hyped mass-appeal poorly-conceived worsly-executed crap.

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:33am**

It's too early to tell what it will do to gaming. Saying "zomg viva la revolucion" is just sensationalist bullshit. Saying "end is nigh" is just doomsday nonsense.

I actually think it's good that this isn't a new idea, because that means the precedent is there for it to be genuine. It's not like these guys came out and said they invented the first working perpetual motion machine.

Posted: **2009-03-25 09:35am**

So it's basically Steam in console form? This seems riddled with any number of problematic technical issues.

Posted: **2009-03-25 09:51am**

It's even worse than being "Console-Steam".

The only thing you have is a small box that connects you like Windows Remote Desktop to the OnLive Server.
The game runs on the server and you only get the controller for input, the monitor for output and the internet connection bill for bankruptcy.

Steam at least has the game running on your PC.

Posted: **2009-03-25 10:11am**

This idea has giant dollar signs flashing in the eyes of any executive who's ever complained about game pirating. If you make the code inaccessible to the public and just pipe them the graphic and sound output, you can keep them on a hook as long as you wish. If I were a profit-concerned exec, I'd leap on this like a frog on flies and fight to make the technology to provide it as accessible and user-friendly as possible while slowly reigning in on other forms of distribution.

Posted: **2009-03-25 10:26am**

On the other hand someone somewhere still has to shell out the big bucks for expensive memory, video cards and CPU to run the games. The end user may not have to pay 1000 USD to get top of the line gaming experience but the people offering this service still does. I don't think cheaper and faster computers will solve this either. Latest Games will always require the best hardware on the market for the full experience. So they will have to keep spending thousands per computer each time something like Crysis 3 is released. While the system could work this upgrade cost will keep subscription fees quite high even if uberspeed broadband becomes ubiquitous.

Posted: **2009-03-25 11:09am**

Lagmonster wrote:This idea has giant dollar signs flashing in the eyes of any executive who's ever complained about game pirating. If you make the code inaccessible to the public and just pipe them the graphic and sound output, you can keep them on a hook as long as you wish. If I were a profit-concerned exec, I'd leap on this like a frog on flies and fight to make the technology to provide it as accessible and user-friendly as possible while slowly reigning in on other forms of distribution.

Of course this pretty much rules out anyone without an internet connection powerful enough to stream huge files like that on a consistent basis. So the executives would be undercutting a massive part of their consumer base because they were afraid of piracy.

Posted: **2009-03-25 01:16pm**

It seems like this sort of thing crops up every couple of years or so. Someone - probably a tech-illiterate executive or investor who's impressed by the big powerful server room, or has a bad day with his computer and wishes that he didn't have to have all these wires and can't someone else just deal with all this shit so that he can just do everything on the tee-vee?????? - someone gets the bright idea that, hey, computers are way super powerful these days. And nobody uses their computer all the time! So why not rent out our big servers to people over the magic internet wires?

It's an old idea with a new face - basically a return to the old server-terminal model of long ago - and I remember people talking about it back before the dot-com bubble had popped. It's yet to really catch on even with just basic computing tasks though, so I'm very skeptical of it gaining any traction with something as resource-intensive and complex as gaming.

It sounds like either someone involved in the venture is one of those people who whines bitterly about having to upgrade every so often, or is trying to cater to those people who whine bitterly about it. (My advice to such people is to just deal with it

since the same complaints have been made since fucking Wing Commander came out.)

It seems to me like a better way of trying to make money off of people who hate having to buy new hardware and games would be to try and set up "gaming centers", i.e. basically PC/console arcades. They exist, there are places where you can pay money to play on their computers. The bitch of it, like most arcades, is managing to make money on it.

What are you talking about? FPS tards have become synonymous with over-internet multi fests. Does it bother them that they've got to put up with pings as it is? No.

I know that people in some countries are accustomed to higher latencies (I remember Stark mocking someone for complaining about ~250ms) but there are loads of people in the US (and probably other well-connected countries) who are quite used to very low latency - hell, even I manage to get ~60ms to one of my favorite servers when I play TF2, and I generally don't ping any higher than 150ms on any other favorites. To these people, 200+ms would be unacceptable... although, to these people upgrading their hardware is also acceptable (although even further, the 'hardcore' FPS players probably aren't upgrading as often as some other gamers, since after a certain point you really don't need anything better to keep playing the same game you've gotten ridiculously good at).

Posted: **2009-03-25 02:15pm**

I, personally, enjoy owning physical gaming media. I don't want to rely on my ISP, or having to have an internet connection for that matter, for a single player experience, which is primarily how I game. So I'm not really excited about this service. Also, if the subscription fees are high due to the continual upgrade of service, how is that really freeing the end-user from the cost it that would have incurred from just buying a console and games outright?

Meh. I'll stick with purchasing my console/PC for gaming, thankyouverymuch.

Posted: **2009-03-25 03:15pm**

CaptHawkeye wrote:What are you talking about? FPS tards have become synonymous with over-internet multi fests. Does it bother them that they've got to put up with pings as it is? No.

This is a different kettle of fish. When you play a regular FPS multiplayer over the internet, your computer already has all the data concerning the layout of the level and what it needs to render to the screen stored in memory. It generally doesn't need to wait for other parties to confirm anything whenever you move your mouse or press a key. When other players move about the level, the game can also try to extrapolate from known data in order to update positions while its waiting for more precise information from other players in the game, but this information is also processed on your own PC.

What's being proposed involves zero processing locally aside from decoding and presenting the frames sent from the server and sending your commands to the server. So, in order to move about using this sort of architecture, you must first press a key, have that information sent to the server, the server processes the command, updates the view and then sends you the updated frames. You cannot extrapolate locally, because you don't have data concerning the game state. Since the latency is affecting you at the level of the interface (and you have to wait for a full-round trip before you get a response) and it's going to feel considerably worse than what it does with the way multiplayer games are played presently where your input is not affected in the same way.

To put it in perspective, assume that it takes 100 ms for data to travel from you to the server and vice-versa. Therefore, when you press right you must wait 100 ms for the server to receive the action, and then another 100 ms before you see the results of pressing right. So you'll need to wait 0.2 seconds before you see any results from your action, which is quite considerable for games requiring quick reflexes. It would sort of be like playing at 5 frames per second when you're used to 60. Sure, there's more intermediate frames, so the motion looks smooth, but controlling it would be almost as hard.

Posted: **2009-03-25 05:59pm**

Won't Work.
Old idea is old etc.

For one, after some very very shallow checking around, this thing needs a 1.5mbps connection minimum, does anyone championing this and whining about hardware upgrades have ANY idea how much fucking bandwidth thats going to chew through in a few hours of gaming? Have fun paying more for a workable internet connection than what you would have spent on "omg super expensive upgrades" that really aren't. ISP's will fight this tooth and nail if it ever catches on, just look at how pissed they are getting at the strain p2p puts on their networks. And most people don't have fucking true unlimited internet connections ("fair use" contract, whats that?), oh shit I gamed for a few hours now my net is shaped/charged a grand in extra bandwidth fees, oh well at least I don't have to pay crazy upgrade prices (ps a mid-high end GPU is like 150 bucks now, oh noes $2000 pc upgrade?

).

Seriously, this idea is not new at all and has been proven unworkable a thousand times before on applications that are far less intensive than gaming. It works for office apps and stuff like that sure, but that is a world of difference in processing and latency requirements. It just screams vapourware, they will never get this working acceptably - the technology just isn't there. I guess people will just have to put up with the terrible upgrade cycle, even though PC part prices are nowhere as bad as they used to be and you can upgrade a reasonable pc to game with for a few hundred bucks. But hey whiners and people with insane ideas like this never let the truth get in the way of a quick buck/publicity/hyperbole/complaining before so why start now?

Posted: **2009-03-25 07:26pm**

I assume it'll be a subscription service, sort of like Sky Tv but for gaming? Damned if I would "buy" a game using this system that's for sure. Yeah it's obvious that gaming companies would love this system; it's the ultimate form of games as a service.

The Jester wrote:To put it in perspective, assume that it takes 100 ms for data to travel from you to the server and vice-versa. Therefore, when you press right you must wait 100 ms for the server to receive the action, and then another 100 ms before you see the results of pressing right.

A decent ping in an fps is around 50, so it's going to feel like a 100, which shouldn't be unplayable though hardly a good thing either. Would be fine for non-twitch gaming however. Ideally this service would be provided by your ISP, which could cut your pings down drastically.

I can only imagine the kind of hardware they are going to need for running say 100,000 instances of Crysis. Will it be big servers or lots of cut back console-like hardware units? In order to keep the pings down they are going to need to have the hardware fairly close to the target audience too. They won't be able to rotate the hardware across timezones; servers in the USA will be idle on UK primetime.

Resinence wrote:ISP's will fight this tooth and nail if it ever catches on, just look at how pissed they are getting at the strain p2p puts on their networks. And most people don't have fucking true unlimited internet connections ("fair use" contract, whats that?), oh shit I gamed for a few hours now my net is shaped/charged a grand in extra bandwidth fees, oh well at least I don't have to pay crazy upgrade prices (ps a mid-high end GPU is like 150 bucks now, oh noes $2000 pc upgrade? ).

Never mind peer-to-peer, ISPs were complaining that the BBC's Iplayer was bringing the internet down.

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:11pm**

Well part of that is that there's seemingly a secret clause that requires all Commonwealth nations to have shitty internet service.

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:13pm**

LOL. I love shit like that. A 'decent ping' is 'about 50'. 100 is 'hardly a good thing'. Turns out you can rule a server with 350? Ping being excuse for sucking is awesome. 100 is 'fine for non-twitch gaming'. LOL! It's like, cyberspace biases Americans toward sucking!

It's even better when the population is considered; this is a lounge-room, casual gaming thing. Nobody's going to be running ELITE CYBERATHLETE TOURNEY 2009 over it.

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:20pm**

Yeah but different games handle latency in different ways. 250 feels okay on a Source-based game (although it still pisses me off when I duck behind a wall and then get killed), but it's absolutely maddening on, say, UT3 because I have to lead people in order to hit them. I mean if coping with high latency is skill then I guess I suck but it doesn't change the fact that I prefer hitscan weapons to, you know, actually hit when the crosshair is over the target when I press the button.

Just because you poor fuckers deal with it doesn't mean it's a good thing or that people shouldn't want better.

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:27pm**

LOL! Latency is bad ... so use instant-hit weapons? Man... this is the best thread ever. It's an ironic example because UT3's netcode seems significantly superior to Source's, for a given value of latency. UT3 is even far, far 'twitchier' in playstyle and yet remains playable at reasonably high latency (certianly higher than fucking 100ms).

Making blanket statements like that about latency is simply ignorant. If you've never dealt with high latency, why make generalisations that are simply wrong? Yes, this whole Onlive idea is complete rubbish and it's going to run into all kinds of technical limitations including latency, but nobody made that guy put numbers out.

It's amusing to me because once you've won a round of XYZ GUN SHOOTER you can tell people you're current latency and they DON'T BELIEVE YOU.

Quote me saying people 'shouldn't want better'. Oops.

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:47pm**

CaptHawkeye wrote: Saying "end is nigh" is just doomsday nonsense.

My angle is that by taking the actual game system away from the user, you're sacrifing things such as modding communities, as well as setting a tough entry requirement for independent developers, or start-ups, thus favoring the companies with the big bucks who release mass-appeal drivel to compensate for their overblown budgets. You know, like consoles and GFWL are doing.

Obviously, gaming won't die, but it'll probably stagnate, and in fact is pretty stagnant as of late (cue to the series of games with the number 4 on their title, or the unending stream of remakes).

I know modding and independents/start-ups are not the exclusive source of creativity in gaming, but allow me to say Counter-Strike! Team-Fortress! Desert Combat!

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:53pm**

It's likely that even if this worked (ps it won't) it'd just take the Sims 2 gamers. This might be good or bad for the rest of the industry, but it's not like Onlive Sims would be automatically terrible (aside from the technical challenges to get it working at all).

Posted: **2009-03-25 08:59pm**

Stark wrote:LOL! Latency is bad ... so use instant-hit weapons? Man... this is the best thread ever. It's an ironic example because UT3's netcode seems significantly superior to Source's, for a given value of latency. UT3 is even far, far 'twitchier' in playstyle and yet remains playable at reasonably high latency (certianly higher than fucking 100ms).

Making blanket statements like that about latency is simply ignorant. If you've never dealt with high latency, why make generalisations that are simply wrong? Yes, this whole Onlive idea is complete rubbish and it's going to run into all kinds of technical limitations including latency, but nobody made that guy put numbers out. It's amusing to me because once you've won a round of XYZ GUN SHOOTER you can tell people you're current latency and they DON'T BELIEVE YOU.

Quote me saying people 'shouldn't want better'. Oops.

What are you getting at? I said that if I use hitscan weapons, I like to actually have it hit when the crosshair is over the target; I didn't mean to say "I prefer hitscan weapons" or "people should specifically use hitscan weapons with high ping". Are you saying that people in high latency scenarios should forsake hitscan weapons altogether? I'm asking because I'm really not sure what you're getting at on this point.

Which generalization was wrong? The one where different games handle latency in different ways? Because you said yourself that was the case. The one where I don't like the way UT3 feels under higher latency? I'm not sure how that can be a wrong generalization, unless they've addressed that in a patch since I played it last . The one where I said I had to lead targets when I used hitscan weapons in UT3? Maybe I misremembered the game (since I almost exclusively play Source FPS these days) but I very certainly remember that experience, and I do certainly remember thinking that UT3 felt a lot different online than it did when I played it on LAN previously.

You didn't say "people shouldn't want better" but you mock people for complaining at all about high latency. I guess I just didn't realize that the only measure of enjoyability was how well you can beat other people at the game. I mean, shit, I could whip ass at Total Annihilation, but it was still frustrating playing with someone with high (like 800ms high) latency, since it made for annoying effects like taking longer to kill units than it should. When it comes to FPS games I know it's not the latency that kills me because sometimes I can't hit shit even on a low ping server, sometimes there's just way better people on than me.

Seriously dude I'm not arguing that high latency is going to kill me more, I'm just saying I don't like the feel of it. Maybe I'm just spoiled, but I don't see anything wrong with suggesting that people who are used to low latency aren't going to want to adopt a system that would impose higher latencies on people.

Posted: **2009-03-25 09:06pm**

The insta-hit weapon/latency issue is a reasonably complex one (even Bungie had to explain it to fans when they changed Halo weapons to be more lag-friendly). I assumed this is what you were talking about.

And I'm not talking about YOUR blanket statements, rather the blanket statements you appear to be defending. You dont' have to say stupid shit like '100ms is pretty terrible and may not be playable' to express why this Onlive shit is going to face significant technical challenges and won't work as envisaged/advertised. People complain about lag all the time (with more or less validity) but again, specific AND WRONG statements such as those made are a crock of shit thrown out by people who don't know what they're talking about.

Older games in particular often had terrible netcode that handled latency very poorly, which is, again, why such nonsense 'rules of thumb' like 'omg 100ms' are worthless. There are modern games that I essentially can't play because 300ms is utterly unplayable. The netcode on the WZ2100 thing is so terrible that above a certain latency you can't damage anyone's units - this is far more the game's fault than the actual round-trip time. UT3 has good netcode, but it's weapons are lag-sensitive (as you note) due to being generally slow as fuck.

As I suggested in my other post, I seriously doubt this system will even ATTEMPT anything in this style of play, not least because I'd expect the latency to not just be high but uneven - something which is far more irritating. Spikes fuck anyone up, wheras a steady-but-high ping (like 250) is often fine, but I'd imagine the way they 'plan' on setting this up people will get a lot of spikes.

Posted: **2009-03-25 09:24pm**

An interesting concept. For multiplayer games it could almost completely destroy cheating in many areas. Everything is done server side and you cannot access that. PC cheats would disappear instantly as a result. Latency is the real bitch.

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