
OnLive shuts down streaming games service, sells patents to Sony - prostoalex
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/04/onlive-shuts-down-streaming-games-service-sells-patents-to-sony-embargoed-7pm-eastern/
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raverbashing
"The service and a $100 microconsole launched in late 2010, but suffered from
noticeable latency and image quality issues in our initial tests."

Did anyone expect differently?

Heck, I expect this would present significant challenges even running on a LAN

It's not a matter of technology, it's a matter of physical impossibility.

I can ping google with 5ms latency. That's for the usual ping size packet,
allows for 200 round-trips per second.

Do you really expect to push inputs and get streamed video back (and encode
and decode said video, which also takes time) with any kind of reasonable
response time?

~~~
vegardx
I've actually tried OnLive, and in less than ideal circumstances. I was amazed
by how good it actually was, even with RTT for 120ms. Some games, like rally
games didn't suffer that badly from the added latency.

For things like first person shooters it didn't work that well, the latency
and input lag was very noticeable. But get that down to a RTT of 20-30ms then
I'm sure most casual gamers will hardly notice.

The encoding and decoding is done in hardware and is negligible at best. Also
something to keep in mind is that kids today are used to input lag. Both PS4
and Xbox One uses wireless controllers.

~~~
archagon
> _Also something to keep in mind is that kids today are used to input lag.
> Both PS4 and Xbox One uses wireless controllers._

The input "lag" with wireless controllers is not in any way comparable to the
lag introduced by streaming your game over the internet. For example, tests
have shown that my current wireless mouse — the Logitech G602 — has no more
latency than a wired mouse. (The range is crap, but that's another issue.) Nor
have I had any latency issues using my Logitech F710 gamepad, even with high
octane games like Super Meat Boy.

~~~
vegardx
Could you link to some of those tests? I'm finding it a little hard to
believe, just with the amount of noise that is on the frequencies used.

~~~
archagon
Unfortunately, it's hard for me to find now since I bought the mouse years
ago. But it has a dedicated receiver and a 500hz polling rate with a reported
2ms latency. Having to be no more than a few feet away from the receiver
probably helps. (In my experience, it just sporadically stops working once the
mouse gets too far away instead of introducing lag.) And again, with the
previous generation of Logitech's wireless gamepad, I was able to complete
Super Meat Boy 100% with no issues at all. Good luck doing that with any
degree of latency!

(I've noticed that Bluetooth tends to be significantly more laggy, but that
might just be confirmation bias.)

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igl
Latency is low enough that nobody cares about making it faster. I was at a
awesome ISP 10 years ago playing quake with < 10ms ping (through clever
routing to certain servers). This is still unmatched, I would say that latency
and connection quality actually decreased. Fluent "live" interaction over the
internet is still decades away.

~~~
josh2600
I mean, it's not decades away...

If you want < 10ms ping, you need to:

1) Be within 10ms of target datacenter (1,860 miles roughly)

2) rip out the TCP/IP handlers in all of the hardware along the route and
replace with highly optimized, workload specific IP handlers (you'll want to
do this in the kernel, OR in an ASIC if you're really serious about speed).

3) own all of the fiber along the route.

Basically, if you can eliminate all of the finger pointing and just own the
network end to end, you could probably implement this today, it's just that no
one is at that scale except for _maybe_ Google (note: I have no idea how
Google runs their internal network, but if I had to guess, this is probably
what they're doing).

Edit: You can get this now, it's just hard and not worth the cost or effort to
do (since no one will bear the cost of building a network like this for
gaming, or really for any application I can think of... there just isn't a
need for this kind of network performance).

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dageshi
Looks like Sony making a sidebet on the death of traditional consoles to me.
If PC's effectively take over the console space then Microsoft is fine since
they have the pre-eminent pc gaming OS. Sony on the otherhand doesn't, so I'm
guessing they're investigating game streaming as an alternative and buying up
IP to do it.

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andybak
Damn. I've got two games I rather wanted to finish playing.

Leaving my lack of ability to finish games to one side - I wonder how
dangerous the patents are? I imagine Sony's strategy is to limit game
streaming to owners of their hardware. If they are aggressive with their IP
that could leave the rest of us shut out of an entire delivery channel.

~~~
MattBearman

      Players who took part in that hybrid plan will still be able to play their 
      purchased games through Steam, but streaming games purchased through 
      Cloudlift or the older Playpass subscriptions will no longer be usable 
      after the end of the month.
    

You may still be able to finish them.

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shurcooL
Previous Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9313866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9313866)

