

New OnLive service could turn the video game world upside down - dmytton
http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/23/steve-perlmans-onlive-could-turn-the-video-game-world-upside-down/

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Angostura
I'm sorry but I'm very very sceptical about this. We are essentially talking
about playing games over VNC.

OK, I exagerate but the video compression etc is going to have to be a
magnitude or more better than anyone else has achieved and there are people
out there who are no slouches at video compression.

I'm sure the demonstrations on a local LAN were great. Let's see it running
over the net.

The only way I can see this working is if they persuade (say) cable companies
to collocate servers at the exchange.

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trapper
I don't believe that they would be foolish enough to believe full rendering
can be done on servers - it's just not a feasible solution with todays
technology unless you are emulating j2me or something.

Perhaps they have something more interesting than that, or there has been some
other innovation. I will reserve judgement until the public internet based
demo.

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Angostura
Of it's going to be cross-platform, about as far as they can go is to send
polygon data for rendering locally. I'm still sceptical, but would of course
love to be proved wrong.

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trapper
Agreed. I hope they know something we don't :)

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brkumar
Extreme Tech has a detailed (annoying multipage) writeup on the offering and
the overview of technology involved.
<http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2343703,00.asp>

Onlive's offering will be a combination of service and/or device with all the
rendering happening on the servers. One key stumbling block for adoption will
be ISP's, in an era where they're capping downloads.

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zcrar70
That does sound pretty impressive - given the apparent importance of low lag
in multiplayer FPS to the hardcore gaming community (of which I'm not part, so
this is just hearsay), I'm not sure how easy it would be to convince hardcore
gamers to move to the platform though. But then maybe they're not the target
audience?

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greendestiny
No game waits for the server to process movement commands before showing the
player moving locally because the lag is unacceptable and that's just raw
movement and game state data. With extra time for the compressed 'image' data
you'd have a completely unacceptable experience. I think casual gamers would
hate the experience just as much. The only game I can think of that would want
good graphics but crap response would be a golf game.

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10ren
Great point about extrapolating game state.

They are way overselling it. It's simply not possible to do as well as a game
running locally, as they claim (maybe in 7 more years...). But there's a
continuum of playability, between ideal and unplayable. If there are other
benefits (flexible, convenient, cheap), and there is an audience who is very
happy with this tradeoff, then this possibly, maybe could be a disruptive
innovation.

It's not going to take off with hardcore twitch FPS, so they seem to be
targeting the wrong market (probably just for a more exciting demo). It's
niche audience might be more like for the Wii: they don't care it's less
powerful and not HD, but they like it because it's more fun (and cheaper). A
similar story for casual games (whose success surprised some people). I'm not
saying it will find a niche; just that it's possible. And then over time,
latency improves, and they're ready for it.

The argument I've heard about coping with first day demand spikes is a bit
silly. Of course it won't handle that - but it doesn't mean it's useless. What
about all the other days? Demand spikes are a problem for physical
distribution channels too.

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biohacker42
I didn't see latency mention once in that article.

