OnLive Aims to Make Game Consoles Obsolete

[moycon]

I actually am not really all that excited about this product. I like walking into a Target or browsing Amazon and finding what I know is a kick ass game for like under $10 on clearance. That is something you wont be doing with a product like this. You'll pay what they are charging in their store and not a penny less. If the retail price for the software is $49.99 you can bet the store will be close to that.

 

I'm curious RT, how is it you can't afford a 360 but you can afford a 15 MB high speed connection?

[Fort Apocalypse]

Watching the press conference here and there on:

http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/

[+Random Terrain]

I'm curious RT, how is it you can't afford a 360 but you can afford a 15 MB high speed connection?

It's part of the cable/telephone/internet bundle.

[Fort Apocalypse]

Steve Perlman just said that the maximum from east to west coast in the beginning was going to be 25 millisecond lag (said 5-25 ms lag).

 

He later said latency would obviously be greater for some ISPs or if you had a bad cable/DSL line, etc. He also doesn't think they will run into bandwidth caps, because they are good citizens, but if they do, they'll work it out.

 

Just ended.

Edited March 25, 2009 by Fort Apocalypse

[DaytonaUSA]

I actually am not really all that excited about this product. I like walking into a Target or browsing Amazon and finding what I know is a kick ass game for like under $10 on clearance. That is something you wont be doing with a product like this. You'll pay what they are charging in their store and not a penny less. If the retail price for the software is $49.99 you can bet the store will be close to that.

 

If you're an iPhone owner, you know the beauty of digital distribution, Moycon . There's sales in order to get your money ALL the time. I check the App Store every day, and I always find something. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the same way.

[DaytonaUSA]

Watching the press conference here and there on:

http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/

 

Wow.. what kinda *** *** (yes, I bleeped myself.. figure it out) podcast only runs at a specific time?? Like I'd go to gamespot religiously...when THEY tell me to, HA.. that'll be the day.

[DaytonaUSA]

I'm curious RT, how is it you can't afford a 360 but you can afford a 15 MB high speed connection?

It's part of the cable/telephone/internet bundle.

 

Don't worry RT, I'd rather have a faster internet speed than a new console as well haha. With as much as I'm on the net, I can't imagine going back to DSL :/

Edited March 25, 2009 by DaytonaUSA

[moycon]

If you're an iPhone owner, you know the beauty of digital distribution, Moycon . There's sales in order to get your money ALL the time. I check the App Store every day, and I always find something. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the same way.

 

I'm not an iPhone owner (In fact I can't stand cell phones, I don't think people should be that accessible) but I have used both Live and the Sony store. As long as this service does like Apple and not Sony and MS that will be cool. The stuff on the PS3 and 360 rarely goes on sale and I love bargains!

[DaytonaUSA]

If you're an iPhone owner, you know the beauty of digital distribution, Moycon . There's sales in order to get your money ALL the time. I check the App Store every day, and I always find something. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the same way.

 

I'm not an iPhone owner (In fact I can't stand cell phones, I don't think people should be that accessible) but I have used both Live and the Sony store. As long as this service does like Apple and not Sony and MS that will be cool. The stuff on the PS3 and 360 rarely goes on sale and I love bargains!

 

Yea I don't shop on the Marketplace or Sony's w/e it's called unless there's an exclusive there.

 

The business model for these guys to copy and emulate is Apple to be honest, since it's selling millions of copies of software in record numbers. I'm just waiting for these guys to open up OnLive to indie devs like the App Store... THEN this will be THE console to buy. If they don't.. they might have a hard time finding a place in an already crowded neighborhood, ya know?

 

But yea, game prices fluctuate all the time in the App Store. It didn't happen at first, but once there were a few hundred apps in there (after 2-3 months), everyone was competing for spotlight time. In the App Store, the cheaper you make your software, the higher chance you get on the top 25. People check the top 25 all the time, and it further boosts your sales so you STAY on the top 25 for a while. I think they said in order to be on the top 25 you have to be selling something like 25,000 copies of a game per week or something amazing like that. It's very profitable .

 

Lastly, I could care less about the iPhone for people contacting me. I have 2 people who I truly care about, and that's it. It's mainly used to check the web and email wherever I'm at, listen to music, watch youtube wherever, or play games. I just dont see it as a "cell phone". It's more like my laptop. In fact, I sold my powerbook because ever since I bought this, I never used the poor thing.

Edited March 25, 2009 by DaytonaUSA

[Reaperman]

i signed up for the beta too--I'm right on the bottom end of their tech spec but we'll see if they pick me.

if this works, i have to see it.

[Tickled_Pink]

I'm a little miffed at their Beta requirements. Must be based in the US? Great way to test for potential lag issues with overseas players.

 

Edit: Oh right ... from the FAQ

 

Where will OnLive be available?

We’ll be launching across the continental US.

 

 

So why is it big news on the BBC News web site? Death of the console? Not for some time yet it seems.

Edited March 25, 2009 by Tickled_Pink

[DaytonaUSA]

This should clear up bandwidth questions:

 

"OnLive says it would be difficult for its users to exceed the monthly bandwidth caps that Internet service providers are increasingly placing on their subscribers. A typical user would have to play about 284 hours - nearly 12 full days - to consume Comcast Corp's 250-gigabyte cap. Nielsen estimates many gamers play roughly 60 hours a month"

[moycon]

More info:

 

http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/new-te...bsolete/1299562

[S1500]

This should clear up bandwidth questions:

 

"OnLive says it would be difficult for its users to exceed the monthly bandwidth caps that Internet service providers are increasingly placing on their subscribers. A typical user would have to play about 284 hours - nearly 12 full days - to consume Comcast Corp's 250-gigabyte cap. Nielsen estimates many gamers play roughly 60 hours a month"

 

 

So there's only the bandwidth cap concern in Korea.

[Mord]

From the article -

You're probably asking, "Well, what games are in there?" OnLive doesn't want to be another GameTap, so it won't be offering a backlog of titles. It promises to have the same games (PC) that are on store shelves at that moment also available to play in OnLive. We were shown GRID and Crysis Wars, and got glimpses of Mirror's Edge, Burnout Paradise and World of Goo. Its struck deals with nine publishers: EA, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Eidos, Codemasters, Epic, Atari, WB and 2D Boy, and, according to Perlman, it only requires minor modifications on Rearden's end to get titles to run on the service.

 

As far as pricing goes, Rearden wasn't releasing numbers. It did mention that the microconsole will cost less than the lowest-priced dedicated console and the OnLive subscription-based service's price will likely be comparable to Xbox Live. That's just to access the service, however. Once inside you can either buy or rent games, and that price point will be left up to the developer. You can instantly demo any game on OnLive, but it's doubtful you'll be able to swap titles with a buddy once you're both done playing them. It's touting "no second sales" and no piracy, which probably means no "Hey, I'll see trade you BioShock for Prince of Persia!" amongst friends. Bummer.

 

One downside of the latency issue is that you can't live more than 1,000 miles from a data center. Rearden's hoping its initial five-server launch will give it a large enough footprint, but we'll have to check in with someone remote to see how their mileage varies. Another downside is that it might suck up your entire bandwidth when gaming: OnLive requires 1.5 Mbps for standard def gaming, and 5 Mbps for high def. Again, it's entirely unclear how well this will work once the pieces are all fitted together. Does this keep us from wanting to try it out? Not at all. We'd welcome a portable game system that doesn't care if your computer doesn't even have a GPU.

 

So, if I get this straight it will be current games, you'll have to pay for the console if you want to play on TV, pay for the service, and pay per game at whatever the developer would like to set the price to. So a developer could set the price as the same as a physical copy if they wanted to and I would be almost willing to bet that there will be upgrades you have to pay for within games too. Plus it will most likely eat all your bandwidth. If it fails you're stuck for whatever you spent along with a paperweight. While they take up more room at least with the current gen consoles you get something to show for your money and if the online subscription fails you're still left with games you can play as opposed to investing a lot of cash into something virtual. Sounds like if you don't care about owning physical property or don't have the space to and have a good amount of money to waste/spend then this would be for you.

 

You presume it will only eat what bandwidth you have. What if it actually demands more? Your game isn't going to run very well is it now.

 

Add to that the ISPs tendency to want to switch over to a metered model for their current "unlimited" bandwidth plans. Given the tendency for the US ISPs for wanting to charge more for increasingly less...

 

Then you're axing any chance at reselling games you've bought, probably at the full retail price of a physical copy, that you've afterwards regretting purchasing due to the game sucking.

 

Plus just because you live close enough to a data center at the time of purchase, what if you end up moving?

 

What if they remove the standard def gaming in the future since "Everyone has HD now" - but you don't have that level of bandwidth.

 

What if the company doesn't do well financially due to say having only a niche market of subscriber types, but those tend to be heavy users? Meaning the company ends up going under and you no longer have your games period.

 

It's easy to think up all the problems this COULD cause. Meh. Perhaps I'm just too attached to the idea of OWNING what I buy and enjoying having a physical copy.

[atarian63]

List of games:

 

(Game title, Publisher)

Burnout: Paradise, Electronics Arts

Hawx, Ubisoft

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, Warner Brothers

Frontlines Fuel of War, THQ

Tomb Raider: Underworld, Eidos

GRID, Codemasters

World of Goo, 2D BOY

Riddick, Atari

Crysis Warhead, Electronic Arts

Wheelman, Ubisoft

Lego Batman, Warner Brothers

Unreal Tournament 3, Epic Games

Major League Baseball 2K9, 2K Games

Mirror's Edge, Electronic Arts

Prince of Persia, Ubisoft

Bioshock, 2K Games

zzzzz huh!? zzzzz

[davepesc]

-snip-

one day.. physical media will be kinda like showing your kid a record player. It'll generate an "oh my God, you lived with this?"

 

Want to feel old? I had a third grader ask me today, "What's a VCR?"

 

As for OnLive, I guess I'm still stuck on "physical media." I rarely even download Live Arcade games because I feel like I don't really have them. I'd be willing to try this. I could see it replacing rentals, but I would still want hard copies of anything I was going to plunk down full price for.

[16-bit]

...

Want to feel old? I had a third grader ask me today, "What's a VCR?"...

 

Wow. That's scary

 

Kids these days...

[Marc Oberhäuser]

GDC: Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work

[Classic Pac]

To be honest this story has been going around for years. I recall first hearing about it roughly 10 years ago in an article in EGM

[+Random Terrain]

To be honest this story has been going around for years. I recall first hearing about it roughly 10 years ago in an article in EGM

To be honest? Does that mean your other posts are full of lies?

[DaytonaUSA]

-snip-

one day.. physical media will be kinda like showing your kid a record player. It'll generate an "oh my God, you lived with this?"

 

Want to feel old? I had a third grader ask me today, "What's a VCR?"

 

As for OnLive, I guess I'm still stuck on "physical media." I rarely even download Live Arcade games because I feel like I don't really have them. I'd be willing to try this. I could see it replacing rentals, but I would still want hard copies of anything I was going to plunk down full price for.

 

 

Wow, sigh.. we're getting old.

 

Regarding the physical media bit, you're right. I am always very reluctant to buy digital games vs phsyical. case in point: when I gave my 360 to my friend, I lost all my dloaded games when we canceled my account on the system so he could use it. No chance for retail... just gone.

 

I guess I like the idea of this box in the sense I never would have to upgrade. Games already impossible to do on a ps3/360 would be possible with this. Who knows how it will work.. it could blow us all away, it could suck. I woudln't mind getting one to try , and to use soley for renting games..until that is the service was popular enough that the company wouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon. Then i'd buy games.

 

As much as I love collecting physical games, I just don't see physical media staying. Which is why I'm trying to rack up my collection of older software now. I think digital copies have their advantages.. but I do agree, as a whole, I wish disks would stay.

 

Hell.. screw disks.. just give me needless packaging to put on my shelf :D

[Artlover]

My prediction is that it will work over the right connection but the latency will make it play like mush. Their claim of one millisecond is absolute BS. Impossible.

 

You don't even know how it works, and you say it's impossible.

Is has nothing to do with knowing or not knowing how their system works. It's about knowing how the internet, that they are using, and networking works, and those latencies simply don't exist, period. The best their latency can be is the best the pipe & supporting network they use can provide plus the pipe & supporting network that their subscribers are using to connect to them. You don't even get 1ms latency inside most closed networks. A network card alone already represents 1ms of latency.

 

You're NOT trasmitting the exact video of the game to your tv. THAT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE. You're sending compressed video that then uncompresses when it reaches you. What I'm trying to say is, it's kinda like getting a 60 mb file in winzip so it's only 2 mb, but you open it and it's 60 mb again. Except it's doing that really really fast, over and over a lot of times. I hope that makes sense.

And? Do you know what latency is? It don't matter if they were sending just 1 single byte, it is plagued by latency every step of the way. Every jump the data takes adds some. Every hub, every router, every relay, every mux/demux, every network interface of any kind. Not to mention the video encoding/decoding itself adds latency too. I think this is where the 1ms latency claim came in at because Perlman said their encoders only introduced 1ms of latency. Yeah, maybe, more like 1.5ms for 720 @ 60fps. That said, it's probably safe to assume they are using the Taos h.264 system. Still doesn't take into account network latency.

 

But I see Fort Apocalypse already replied regarding this in post 54 with revised latency numbers by OnLive's CEO, Steve Perlman:

Steve Perlman just said that the maximum from east to west coast in the beginning was going to be 25 millisecond lag (said 5-25 ms lag).

 

He later said latency would obviously be greater for some ISPs or if you had a bad cable/DSL line, etc. He also doesn't think they will run into bandwidth caps, because they are good citizens, but if they do, they'll work it out.

Guess some network savvy people called him out on that impossible claim, so he had to revise it to numbers that sometimes can exist in real world conditions. But even those revised numbers are on the low side and represent a best case scenario and sure won't represent what end users will be getting when connecting to their systems (which he admitted in the above).

 

Here's a shocker, they are running this game on a set of servers hundreds of miles away. And every reputable news source is saying it "surprised them" in how well it looked and worked.

100's of miles? Didn't Perlman say 50?

 

Besides, it's really easy to make a very small scale demo work. Server requirements are small, bandwidth requirements are small. It's called smoke & mirrors of carefully controlling every aspect from end to end in order to ensure it performs like they claim it will, ignoring the fact that real world application will not be under their careful control of "lets have our servers in a datacenter 50 miles away running across a dedicated leased high bandwidth pipe straight to the demo floor". - Yeah, when you fake it, of course it works. (Having been in TV for nearly 5 years and setting up dedicated video servers for cable trade shows and controlling them remotely off-site as the floor man secretly phones in to me what he wants me to make them do to impress the current audience, I know all about faking things to make it seem like it works when it don't in an effort to get contracts.)

 

This should clear up bandwidth questions:

 

"OnLive says it would be difficult for its users to exceed the monthly bandwidth caps that Internet service providers are increasingly placing on their subscribers. A typical user would have to play about 284 hours - nearly 12 full days - to consume Comcast Corp's 250-gigabyte cap. Nielsen estimates many gamers play roughly 60 hours a month"

Point #1: This assumes these people don't use their internet for anything else. I already use over 200+ gigs per month just in my daily useage doing things important to me, and the only reason my usage is that low is because of the limits. I've already been warned once for exceeding them. I wouldn't even be able to use this unless I upgraded my service to business class with no caps else I'd loose my connection for a year.

 

Point #2: You're still talking about nearly 1 gig per hour of use. Sorry, they can hide behind the BS of how much they think the average gamer plays, but that is still a hell of a lot of bandwidth. - Lets put this into perspective. 1000 users playing for an hour just pushed 1 tera across the internet. Imagine 100's of thousands or even millions of users playing for more then an hour. If it could actually work and became popular, even assuming 60 hours a month per user, your talking PETAbytes. This could end up being #3 or #4 (behind only Google, YouTube and P2P networks) for global internet useage. - The internet infrastructure is already congested enough. Google internet capacity. You'll read some interesting things. Things such as that the internet is already nearly maxed out and is expected to hit the wall by 2010, with a 50 fold increase in useage by 2015 because of the sharp increase of things like VoD, VoIP, P2P (and things like OnLive). IPv6 is in the works, but lets be honest here, it's not intergrated into the main stream enough yet to help. Actually, because of IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling, there is just that much "less" bandwidth to go around.

 

Point #3: 60 hours a month? Huh? I can (and have) play that much in a week!

 

 

Know what the real fundamental problem is? There needs to be a seperate server running the game feeding into a seperate video encoder for each and every user playing. It ain't no VoD or YouTube where everyone is reading the same file from a centralized server bank. 1 million players = 1 million servers + 1 million video encoders, sending petabytes out across 1 million ports over the real internet. The shear scale of the project is beyond anything ever done, ever by anyone. There doesn't exist anything even remotely simmilar to compare it to to even hint it could work. Never mind the astronomical cost invovled. Even the experts in all the fields this project is relying on don't see how it can ever work, some flat out saying it's beyond our abilities at this particular time. To that end, ALL we have is a very VERY small scale staged demo.

 

I'm going to make a prediction. In a couple of years, investors are going to be wondering where the money is and the FBI is going to be working with Interpol trying to find what country Perlman is hiding out in.

[+Random Terrain]

Does that mean the game developers don't know how the Internet works? You'd think somebody at the various game companies would speak up and say "Sir, this is bullshit. Don't waste our time and your money."

[Fort Apocalypse]

I'm going to make a prediction. In a couple of years, investors are going to be wondering where the money is and the FBI is going to be working with Interpol trying to find what country Perlman is hiding out in.

 

I don't think it is quite that bad. Even though it was very obvious Perlman was setting himself up to be body slammed with some of the stuff he said, I'm impressed that a company without customers has gotten big name game companies and big name games, even if they aren't incredibly new. I'm a fan of the idea, and I hope that they do well enough so that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft consider similar bandwidth intensive game streaming initiatives. Why? Because maybe it will drive the cables companies and phone companies to run fiber lines everywhere. ! Besides everyone will be streaming all of their movies soon and DVDs and blue-rays will be the VHS tapes of the 2010's ("twenty-teens").