There are important, fundamental reasons why OnLive can never replace the current gaming model. And those haven't changed.
For starters, you can't get a gaming experience comparable to what you could have on modern integrated graphics. And furthermore, you probably never will be able to, because those integrated graphics will keep getting better--and probably faster than OnLive does. It certainly won't be possible in the foreseeable future.
Input latency is much nastier than adding the same amount to your ping times. That's not solvable unless either Internet technology advances dramatically, or else local ISPs are willing to let OnLive build stuff into their local networks. There are a lot of situations in games where if you react quickly enough, you don't get hit. That might get covered up by clever network code if it's adding 50 ms to your ping time, but not if it's input latency.
Even apart from input latency, the compression algorithms needed to reduce the amount of space that an image takes by 99.9% will hurt image quality greatly. That means that even if you ignore latency issues, you can't get image quality to match modern integrated graphics, let alone a real gaming system.
Now, OnLive will deliver a better experience than having a game not playable at all for people with ancient computers like the original poster. But look who that means their customers are: people who can't pay for computer stuff. Almost axiomatically, OnLive's customer base is restricted to people who can't afford a computer with modern integrated graphics, or an older gaming system that is at least competitive with modern integrated graphics. Think there's a lot of money to be made off of such people? I don't.
There's also the issue that OnLive uses a lot of bandwidth. It could easily be two orders of magnitude more than a typical online game. That means that on days when your Internet connection isn't the best, games won't be playable using OnLive, but will be playable by other means. And do you really want to lose access to single player games entirely just because your Internet connection is spotty?
ISPs notice this stuff, too. You know why ISPs went so far out of their way to hamstring file-sharers? It's not because they're worried about IP infringement. It's because they don't like 1% of their customers using up 50% of their bandwidth. If some particular application uses outlandishly large amounts of bandwidth, ISPs will notice and will sabotage it. They have to in order to be profitable.
Guess what OnLive does? Uses huge amounts of bandwidth. Right now, ISPs can ignore it, because hardly anyone uses it. But if it catches on, then ISPs will find creative ways to restrict things just enough to make OnLive unusable, while everything else works fine. And if OnLive users want to cancel their account and take their business elsewhere, then ISPs will be happy to see them go.
mm poster:if 64 bit is any indication(can you name 10 64 bit game that were made from start with 64 bit in mind and not an old game modded to 64 bit>)i sure cant.so hardware might go to the moon but the sad truth is dev stick very close to console in term of setting.onlive and other service like this might change that tho cause when the dev make say a 64 bit game he had to bother with all kind of data like intel.amd.nvidia etc.but with service as onlive game dev like blizzrd etc will be inclined to do the highest they possibly can cause they know a server specificly made for this type of thing will be doing the work .the main trouble in the past was the variety of device but with thing like onlive(if it works )everage user can pretty much access the service via anything since it is streaming ,as we know intel has been working very hard to give the best experience in that area ,arent they releasing 4k x4k support soon?
onlive via 4k x 4k screen mm some game might be interesting in those big screen size lol
Dude, you are a dying breed. All media is moving to a cloud environment... gaming included. On-live is pioneering the future whether you personally like it or not. Look at the facts. Everything is moving toward cloud computing. Windows 8 and the next generation of the Mac OS will have cloud computing intergrated into the OS itself. Google and Rim are working toward the same goal with their OS's. Right now we are seeing a revolution in how we as consumers will consume our media. Pretty soon everything will be cloud based and very little will be stored locally. This is the trend the industry is taking. On-live just got the idea before a lot of others caught on. If you think otherwise the very near future is going to run you over like a frieght train.
Bren
Dying breed or not, this change will not happen in the next few years. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. No one in their right mind can claim that OnLive offers a superior gaming experience compared to a 1k USD gaming rig and a game played locally. If they do, they are delusional.
As long as there are people who think the 1k USD is worth the difference in the quality of their gaming experience, they will buy those rigs and buy those locally stored games.
Companies have been talking about replaing PCs with dummy terminal for decades now. That hasn't happened either, and we are talking about intranet infrastructure with a lot fewer problems concerning network lag and other issues.
You are right... they have been talking about it for over a decade. The difference now is they've stopped talking and now they are doing it. Like it or not it is on the very near horizon.
Bren
Maybe you'd like to define "very near horizon". Are we talking in the next 2 years? Next 5 years? Next ten years?
Anything less than 5 years and I'll say you're being optimistic. Next ten years? Possibly.
When OnLive can play games at 5280x1080 and I can choose wether or not and I get to choose which kind of Antil Aliasing or DX11 effects I play with etc etc etc then I *might* consider it.
Until then, I will continue to use my own PC which doubles as my work machine as well as my entertainment.
Dude, you are a dying breed. All media is moving to a cloud environment... gaming included. On-live is pioneering the future whether you personally like it or not. Look at the facts. Everything is moving toward cloud computing. Windows 8 and the next generation of the Mac OS will have cloud computing intergrated into the OS itself. Google and Rim are working toward the same goal with their OS's. Right now we are seeing a revolution in how we as consumers will consume our media. Pretty soon everything will be cloud based and very little will be stored locally. This is the trend the industry is taking. On-live just got the idea before a lot of others caught on. If you think otherwise the very near future is going to run you over like a frieght train.
Bren
Dying breed or not, this change will not happen in the next few years. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. No one in their right mind can claim that OnLive offers a superior gaming experience compared to a 1k USD gaming rig and a game played locally. If they do, they are delusional.
As long as there are people who think the 1k USD is worth the difference in the quality of their gaming experience, they will buy those rigs and buy those locally stored games.
Companies have been talking about replaing PCs with dummy terminal for decades now. That hasn't happened either, and we are talking about intranet infrastructure with a lot fewer problems concerning network lag and other issues.
You are right... they have been talking about it for over a decade. The difference now is they've stopped talking and now they are doing it. Like it or not it is on the very near horizon.
Bren
Maybe you'd like to define "very near horizon". Are we talking in the next 2 years? Next 5 years? Next ten years?
Anything less than 5 years and I'll say you're being optimistic. Next ten years? Possibly.
I would say that with Windows 8 and the next major Mac OS overhaul coming in late 2012/early 2013 and giving time for the new features to catch on 5 years would be well within the realm of possibilities. Change is slow even in the computer industry but the cloud computing revolution has already started. We are witnessing the begining of a shift in the industry. Within the next 5-10 years I would expect to see at least 80%-90% of what is now stored locally shifted over to the cloud. Yes they have been talking about it for a very long time but now the technology is finally catching up to the point that they can actually do it. The On-Live service is one of the pioneers of this revolution. Expect to see more and more of this in the years to come in every aspect of data and program storage.
When OnLive can play games at 5280x1080 and I can choose wether or not and I get to choose which kind of Antil Aliasing or DX11 effects I play with etc etc etc then I *might* consider it.
Until then, I will continue to use my own PC which doubles as my work machine as well as my entertainment.
You sir, are a technophile. I would go so far as to say that you're a complete graphics whore, but I'm not sure how you would take that.
At any rate, you represent an extreme niche market. When we start using terms like 'best' we tend to forget that 'best' is a subjective / situational term. "Best" for whom exactly? You base your entire decision on the picture fidelity. Not the gameplay. Not even the number of actual polygons that make up the scene. Just the number of pixels and the frame rate.
Seriously, a rig that would run Crysis at those settings would cost several thousand dollars. The monitor alone would probably cost as much as my last laptop. Even among people that have that much money to burn, those willing to drop that kind of money on a gaming rig is very, very low. And the potential game sales to that market doesn't justify the enourmous cost of developing for that market.
Guess what the best selling game platform is in Brazil. Done?
It's the Sega Master System. Toy companies have made buckets of cash knocking off the SMS in South America for decades. In a country where the income of most people has been less than $500 a month, even the poorest people can scrape together $50 for a clone system with some built in games. The practice has even come to the U.S. in the form of Famiclones like the FC Twin and Retron 3.
The point is, not everyone is like you. Not everyone has, or is willing to part with, the kind of cash needed for such high end toys. And not everyone values the same things in gaming as you.
Dude, you are a dying breed. All media is moving to a cloud environment... gaming included. On-live is pioneering the future whether you personally like it or not. Look at the facts. Everything is moving toward cloud computing. Windows 8 and the next generation of the Mac OS will have cloud computing intergrated into the OS itself. Google and Rim are working toward the same goal with their OS's. Right now we are seeing a revolution in how we as consumers will consume our media. Pretty soon everything will be cloud based and very little will be stored locally. This is the trend the industry is taking. On-live just got the idea before a lot of others caught on. If you think otherwise the very near future is going to run you over like a frieght train.
Bren
hehehe he's the kind of "dying breed" that helped build the cloud environment:D it's funny that people keep spitting out catch phrases like "cloud computing" and have absolutly no idea how the technology works and the problems clouds have:D you might want to take a few years and learn about computers and how it works before TRYING to insult someone who actually knows how the technology works:D
Dude, you are a dying breed. All media is moving to a cloud environment... gaming included. On-live is pioneering the future whether you personally like it or not. Look at the facts. Everything is moving toward cloud computing. Windows 8 and the next generation of the Mac OS will have cloud computing intergrated into the OS itself. Google and Rim are working toward the same goal with their OS's. Right now we are seeing a revolution in how we as consumers will consume our media. Pretty soon everything will be cloud based and very little will be stored locally. This is the trend the industry is taking. On-live just got the idea before a lot of others caught on. If you think otherwise the very near future is going to run you over like a frieght train.
Bren
hehehe he's the kind of "dying breed" that helped build the cloud environment:D it's funny that people keep spitting out catch phrases like "cloud computing" and have absolutly no idea how the technology works and the problems clouds have:D you might want to take a few years and learn about computers and how it works before TRYING to insult someone who actually knows how the technology works:D
I have a BS(4 year degree) in Information Technology... How's your education? I know full well how Cloud Computing works. Do you?
I have a BS(4 year degree) in Information Technology... Hows your education? I know full well how Cloud Computing works. Do you?
Bren
I worked in the IT industry for over 15 years and have consulted for many networks and builds:D just because you've taken a few classes on C++ doesnt mean you've actually been in the trenchs and saw how bleeding edge technology works. have you ever worked with alpha versions of a firmware because the beta versions just doesnt work?:D I worked with clouds before it was even called clouds... yes it was called clustering back in the day. have YOU studied how much bandwidth it would take to make cloud gaming actually work properly? do you even know the bandwidth requirements of 1080p gaming even on something as low as 30hz? do you even know what the current network limitations are for cloud computing?
I worked in the IT industry for over 15 years and have consulted for many networks and builds:D just because you've taken a few classes on C++ doesnt mean you've actually been in the trenchs and saw how bleeding edge technology works. A 4 year degree and over 10 years experience is hardly 'a few classes'. have you ever worked with alpha versions of a firmware because the beta versions just doesnt work?:D Yes, many times. I worked with clouds before it was even called clouds... yes it was called clustering back in the day. Clustering was a little different but the same principals apply. have YOU studied how much bandwidth it would take to make cloud gaming actually work properly? Yes, but the tech has caught up at this point. do you even know the bandwidth requirements of 1080p gaming even on something as low as 30hz? Again yes, it is high... for 5 years ago. do you even know what the current network limitations are for cloud computing? It still has it's limitations I'll admit but as I said before the those limitations will be nullified within the next 2-5 years. 10 years max.
If someone would have asked me if something like On-Live or any live streaming applications over the Internet was possible as little as 5 years ago I would have sounded a lot like you are now. I would have told them, "Impossible, not for at least another 15-20 years!". A lot has changed and the technology behind these types of services has advanced dramatically in the last 5 years. If these advancements continue at the same rate all of your arguments will be nullified in the very near future.
When OnLive can play games at 5280x1080 and I can choose wether or not and I get to choose which kind of Antil Aliasing or DX11 effects I play with etc etc etc then I *might* consider it.
Until then, I will continue to use my own PC which doubles as my work machine as well as my entertainment.
You sir, are a technophile. I would go so far as to say that you're a complete graphics whore, but I'm not sure how you would take that.
At any rate, you represent an extreme niche market. When we start using terms like 'best' we tend to forget that 'best' is a subjective / situational term. "Best" for whom exactly? You base your entire decision on the picture fidelity. Not the gameplay. Not even the number of actual polygons that make up the scene. Just the number of pixels and the frame rate.
Seriously, a rig that would run Crysis at those settings would cost several thousand dollars. The monitor alone would probably cost as much as my last laptop. Even among people that have that much money to burn, those willing to drop that kind of money on a gaming rig is very, very low. And the potential game sales to that market doesn't justify the enourmous cost of developing for that market.
Guess what the best selling game platform is in Brazil. Done?
It's the Sega Master System. Toy companies have made buckets of cash knocking off the SMS in South America for decades. In a country where the income of most people has been less than $500 a month, even the poorest people can scrape together $50 for a clone system with some built in games. The practice has even come to the U.S. in the form of Famiclones like the FC Twin and Retron 3.
The point is, not everyone is like you. Not everyone has, or is willing to part with, the kind of cash needed for such high end toys. And not everyone values the same things in gaming as you.
Get over yourself.
Ummmm.....no.
For $800 I can and recently DID build a system that will crush any game you throw at it.
People claiming that this cloud computing thing is going to change GAMING are delusional. Nvidia and ATI are not going to be closing up shop any time soon. SSD drives are not going to become obsolete just as they are gaining a foothold.
Cloud computing will be handy for movies and music, document sharing, etc. But for PC GAMING, the future still lies in hardware and purchased software.
PC hardware is getting cheaper than ever, and you don't need bleeding edge hardware to max out the newest games.
Now, Onlive is probably a great thing for people with old hardware, or a netbook or something. Hell, if they made a version that would run PC games on Android / iphones, they could rake in the cash.
It IS a good idea, but it will never replace a real gaming rig.
sooo onlive is basicly the netflix of video games ???? a tad more advanced steam??
i find it odd how they can claim i can play any game i want on pc or mac... but what happens if the game i want to play is mac only or pc only?? wouldnt that make their claim a farce??
and for that matter.. what kind of actual system is this?? a live stream??? peer to peer?? what?? sounds alittle too far fetched for my tastes. more so if it means i have to deal with 300+ping or what feels like it... i hate that kind of lag.
personally ill stick to my D2D/steam and physical games over something that may or may not be alittle too tempermental for my tastes of gaming enjoyment though if it manages to take off who knows what might happen a few years from now...
if countries would just fking take their balls out of their purses and lay some new netcables around the globe to make the internet faster.... this would be all the rage o-o
When OnLive can play games at 5280x1080 and I can choose wether or not and I get to choose which kind of Antil Aliasing or DX11 effects I play with etc etc etc then I *might* consider it.
Until then, I will continue to use my own PC which doubles as my work machine as well as my entertainment.
You sir, are a technophile. I would go so far as to say that you're a complete graphics whore, but I'm not sure how you would take that.
At any rate, you represent an extreme niche market. When we start using terms like 'best' we tend to forget that 'best' is a subjective / situational term. "Best" for whom exactly? You base your entire decision on the picture fidelity. Not the gameplay. Not even the number of actual polygons that make up the scene. Just the number of pixels and the frame rate.
Seriously, a rig that would run Crysis at those settings would cost several thousand dollars. The monitor alone would probably cost as much as my last laptop. Even among people that have that much money to burn, those willing to drop that kind of money on a gaming rig is very, very low. And the potential game sales to that market doesn't justify the enourmous cost of developing for that market.
Guess what the best selling game platform is in Brazil. Done?
It's the Sega Master System. Toy companies have made buckets of cash knocking off the SMS in South America for decades. In a country where the income of most people has been less than $500 a month, even the poorest people can scrape together $50 for a clone system with some built in games. The practice has even come to the U.S. in the form of Famiclones like the FC Twin and Retron 3.
The point is, not everyone is like you. Not everyone has, or is willing to part with, the kind of cash needed for such high end toys. And not everyone values the same things in gaming as you.
Get over yourself.
I don't know how to break it to you but my PC is not worth thousands of dollars if we go by current prices.
I've said this before but I will repeat here, buying into a High-End PC is indeed expensive but it is no where near as expensive to maintain than many people believe. If you wanted my PC today, starting from scratch, then yeah you would need to pay a fair bit. But in two years when you go to upgrade it you find you don't need a new Keyboard/Mouse/Monitors/Tower etc etc etc because you bought the right kind of parts first time around. And the parts you do replace you can sell on to friends/ebay/whatever so you don't need to pay full price on your new stuff.
In replying to my post you completely missed my point as well, it isn't about being in the super duper niche market of people who play at a gajillion pixels per inch and must run at twelve thousand fps.. It's about having the flexiblity to be able to control the environment you play in. If I play EVE then normal Anti Aliasing just doesn't deal very well with jaggies on stationary objects, can OnLive turn on MLAA or SSAA to fix that? Can it turn on and off Ambient Occlusion? What about other DX features? What resolutions can I play at? Do I get any of the in game achievements credited to my account?
You're putting all your eggs into someone elses basket.. at least if you own the game and own a PC that can play said game then you are in full control of the entire experience from start to finish. It is a very nice feature, being able to play games via the cloud, but it will not be the ground breaking genre changing force that a lot of people are claiming.
As for niche market... Tell that to the other three people who live here, or the other 6 or 7 guys in my work who are all waiting for Battlefield 3 to come out.
If someone would have asked me if something like On-Live or any live streaming applications over the Internet was possible as little as 5 years ago I would have sounded a lot like you are now. I would have told them, "Impossible, not for at least another 15-20 years!". A lot has changed and the technology behind these types of services has advanced dramatically in the last 5 years. If these advancements continue at the same rate all of your arguments will be nullified in the very near future.
Bren
"the tech" hasn't cought up as much as you'd think. there is only so much you can do with compression. when you play on the cloud, you are essentially getting a HD stream of the images processed by the cloud. that amount of bandwidth is neither cheap nor avaliable to the consumers yet.
even something as simple as watching a HD movie stream from home still require some kind of buffering.... buffering CAN'T happen when you are talking about gaming... gaming requires instantaneous rendering of images according to YOUR actions on the controls... sure you can "stream" a turn based game like chess or civ5, but you arent going to stream something as complicated as FPS or RTS at any resonable framerate. the "last mile" of internet is still copper. you can only push copper so far just like you can only push compression so far before your "netbook" cant even handle the rendering of images from a compressed source...
will cloud gaming work? eventually. when fiber makes its way to homes. but that "last mile" is way too expensive for any cable/telco to undertake for any large scale deployment. that is an ECONOMIC limitation NOT a technological limitation. eventually, when we all get a gig pipe coming to the house, i'll give this cloud gaming another look, but as far as today? i'll just remind you that even HDMI 1.0 spec calls for 4.9Gbit/S bandwidth...
Seriously, a rig that would run Crysis at those settings would cost several thousand dollars. The monitor alone would probably cost as much as my last laptop.
Ummmm.....no.
For $800 I can and recently DID build a system that will crush any game you throw at it.
People claiming that this cloud computing thing is going to change GAMING are delusional. Nvidia and ATI are not going to be closing up shop any time soon. SSD drives are not going to become obsolete just as they are gaining a foothold.
Cloud computing will be handy for movies and music, document sharing, etc. But for PC GAMING, the future still lies in hardware and purchased software.
PC hardware is getting cheaper than ever, and you don't need bleeding edge hardware to max out the newest games.
Now, Onlive is probably a great thing for people with old hardware, or a netbook or something. Hell, if they made a version that would run PC games on Android / iphones, they could rake in the cash.
It IS a good idea, but it will never replace a real gaming rig.
Please. Give us the parts list.
Then again, it wouldn't do any good. You see the highest monitor resolution I was able to find was 1080p. The most expensive monitor on Newegg doesn't even have the resolution that he's banging on about. Of course, I may be reading it wrong and he's talking about THREE monitors at the same time. In which case, my point is still valid since he/she will have sank at least $600 into the display alone.
And I realize that you can make a decent PC for around $500 and a really awesome tower for $800+, but the guy I was responding to wants the bleeding edge and that cost serious bank.
And for the majority of gamers, cloud computing WILL be the future. There will still be some companies, mostly indies, making download only games that you have to install, but the bulk of gaming will be streamed in the future.
Why would I pour money into a huge tower that causes my block to brown out every time I turn it on when I could just pay $7 bucks and play a game from a similar system streamed to my netbook or iPad? The price of game hardware remains roughly the same, but the cost of gaming actually goes down. Cloud computing is just one more milestone on that road.
sooo onlive is basicly the netflix of video games ???? a tad more advanced steam??
i find it odd how they can claim i can play any game i want on pc or mac... but what happens if the game i want to play is mac only or pc only?? wouldnt that make their claim a farce??
and for that matter.. what kind of actual system is this?? a live stream??? peer to peer?? what?? sounds alittle too far fetched for my tastes. more so if it means i have to deal with 300+ping or what feels like it... i hate that kind of lag.
cloud computing is platform independent because it basiclly processes the game on the server then send you a stream of images to be displayed on your screen. when you move in the game, your movements are sent to the server, the server render the image with your movements, then send the image back to your computer for display. you can see the downfall of that when you have a lost packet of a high ping:)
the technology isnt there yet. they are just starting threads like this to try to generate hype. it's part of their marketing strategy even tho the tech just isnt there yet.
If someone would have asked me if something like On-Live or any live streaming applications over the Internet was possible as little as 5 years ago I would have sounded a lot like you are now. I would have told them, "Impossible, not for at least another 15-20 years!". A lot has changed and the technology behind these types of services has advanced dramatically in the last 5 years. If these advancements continue at the same rate all of your arguments will be nullified in the very near future.
Bren
"the tech" hasn't cought up as much as you'd think. there is only so much you can do with compression. when you play on the cloud, you are essentially getting a HD stream of the images processed by the cloud. that amount of bandwidth is neither cheap nor avaliable to the consumers yet.
even something as simple as watching a HD movie stream from home still require some kind of buffering.... buffering CAN'T happen when you are talking about gaming... gaming requires instantaneous rendering of images according to YOUR actions on the controls... sure you can "stream" a turn based game like chess or civ5, but you arent going to stream something as complicated as FPS or RTS at any resonable framerate. the "last mile" of internet is still copper. you can only push copper so far just like you can only push compression so far before your "netbook" cant even handle the rendering of images from a compressed source...
will cloud gaming work? eventually. when fiber makes its way to homes. but that "last mile" is way too expensive for any cable/telco to undertake for any large scale deployment. that is an ECONOMIC limitation NOT a technological limitation. eventually, when we all get a gig pipe coming to the house, i'll give this cloud gaming another look, but as far as today? i'll just remind you that even HDMI 1.0 spec calls for 4.9Gbit/S bandwidth...
Try On-Live for yourself. I wouldn't have believed it possible either before I experienced it first hand (I was one of it's biggest opponents before I tried it quoting just about every argument you've put forward here). The very existance of it nullifies most of your arguments here. Gamestop and a few other companies are already trying to copy it. On-live isn't perfect i'll admit but it is a huge leap forward in cloud gaming.
will cloud gaming work? eventually. when fiber makes its way to homes. but that "last mile" is way too expensive for any cable/telco to undertake for any large scale deployment. that is an ECONOMIC limitation NOT a technological limitation. eventually, when we all get a gig pipe coming to the house, i'll give this cloud gaming another look, but as far as today? i'll just remind you that even HDMI 1.0 spec calls for 4.9Gbit/S bandwidth...
OnLive definitely makes some tradeoffs. The image is actually 480i widescreen. This is basically the reason they can get away with what they do. The images lose fidelity over their local installed cousins, but the games are completely playable. The only time I noticed any over significant frame loss was while Playing Pure. Incidentally, the quality of that youtube video is about the same as the image quality on OnLive.
I can't help but think that streaming would work beautifully with retro games. Doom, Quake, Warcraft 2, just about any SNES or Sega Genesis game, all ran at 320X240 or lower resolution. With a broadband connection, streaming those games would be nothing. You could probably even go as high as 800X600 and stream Quake 3 real-time. The tech is not as far behind as you think it is.
Cloud gaming is the futureof gaming, but it just isn't viable yet. The U.S. network just isn't fast enough yet. Once it is,
then it will be able to play cloud gaming without too much difficulty. I see OnLive as a "proof of concept" but nothing more.
We are about five years away from it from moving from the "tolerable" to the "fully playable" phase. However, the entire nation is in danger of complete finanacial collapse before then, so we may never see it.
Question about Onlive if someone doesnt mind answering. I see its around 9 bucks a month but THAT is only for Playback Bundle games NOT new releases right? If you want the new releases does that mean you have to buy them or rent them for a few days?
Any help would be great. You can send me a private mail if this question is off topic from the forum.
Thanks in advance
Juggie
CPU-HP Omen 17.3" Laptop i7 12 GB AMD Radeon RX580 1 TB Hard Drive
Question about Onlive if someone doesnt mind answering. I see its around 9 bucks a month but THAT is only for Playback Bundle games NOT new releases right? If you want the new releases does that mean you have to buy them or rent them for a few days?
Any help would be great. You can send me a private mail if this question is off topic from the forum.
Thanks in advance
Juggie
As far as I can tell, it depends on the game.
Some of the games are included in the bundle. Some of the games allow three or five day rentals. And some of the games require you pay for the game. There isn't any consistency about this either.
You don't have to pay for the monthly sub, but some games are ONLY available through the sub. You can rent some games, but not all of them. Still other games can be bought retail price, but you can't get them through the sub or renting them. You just have to browse the marketplace and find out.
For me, there are enough games that I can rent for five days that I can get through until I have a new game rig built.
Okay thank you for the reply. So basically as long as I have the app on my comp I dont not need to Subscribe. I can just rent games that I want to play. I wasnt sure if it was a flat fee of 9 bucks + any rented newer games So I can basically get away with spending 5 bucks a month just to play a game for 3 days. Sadly, most console games last only a few days so it saves me from buying them. Do you recommend getting the Playback with those games or are they really not worth the 9 day a month fee?
CPU-HP Omen 17.3" Laptop i7 12 GB AMD Radeon RX580 1 TB Hard Drive
I prefer console or PC. I do use Onlive on occasion...mostly to check out demos without major load times. Both the demos and full game sI've played ran pretty well in my case. No noticeable lag for about 99% of the time. The only complaint is that it looks like your looking at a video of a game being played (which I guess is exactly what's happening)...like a thin milky screen has been placed over your monitor.
Dude, you are a dying breed. All media is moving to a cloud environment... gaming included. On-live is pioneering the future whether you personally like it or not. Look at the facts. Everything is moving toward cloud computing. Windows 8 and the next generation of the Mac OS will have cloud computing intergrated into the OS itself. Google and Rim are working toward the same goal with their OS's. Right now we are seeing a revolution in how we as consumers will consume our media. Pretty soon everything will be cloud based and very little will be stored locally. This is the trend the industry is taking. On-live just got the idea before a lot of others caught on. If you think otherwise the very near future is going to run you over like a frieght train.
Way to not even address the argument. Come back when OnLive offers better image quality than Radeon HD 6620G integrated graphics. That may or may not ever happen, but if it does, it will be so far in the future that virtually everyone will have better graphics by then anyway.
Cloud computing does make a ton of sense for some purposes, such as word processing or e-mail in some (many, but not all) circumstances. But in programs like that, the screen isn't being rendered remotely an then streamed to you as a video. The data is saved remotely, and the little bit of data you need is sent to you, and then rendered locally. That is, it's more analogous to online games where the game server keeps track of what is going on in the world, but the image on your screen is rendered locally.
"I hope you can bring that fast rig of yours around when you're out of the country..or even out of your home for longer than a weekend."
You know what I tend not to have when I travel like that? A high speed, stable Internet connection as needed for OnLive to work properly.
"Even so, ever heard of thresholds? Whilst I haven't read the study the original poster mentions, it's entirely possible for there to be such a threshold and even for it to be around 85ms."
Actually, let's try a simple thought experiment. An 85 ms delay between frames corresponds to less than 12 frames per second. Try playing a game at 12 frames per second and see how it goes. That will be fine for some fully turn-based games. But for many, that's completely unplayable.
"Yes they have been talking about it for a very long time but now the technology is finally catching up to the point that they can actually do it."
They can make it kind of work. Just not well enough to be competitive with modern integrated graphics. And it's very unlikely that they ever will be able to compete with modern integrated graphics. So they can make it work, but not well enough to have much a point outside of a niche market that is going to keep right on shrinking.
"In a country where the income of most people has been less than $500 a month, even the poorest people can scrape together $50 for a clone system with some built in games."
That's kind of my point: how will such people afford a $50/month Internet connection to run OnLive? Most of the people who can afford a system to run OnLive properly can do better by spending the same money elsewhere. And in coming years, that is going to move from "most" to "essentially all".
"I would have told them, "Impossible, not for at least another 15-20 years!". A lot has changed and the technology behind these types of services has advanced dramatically in the last 5 years."
There's an enormous chasm between "kind of works, but not as well as the alternatives" and "works well enough to be better than the atlernatives". Exhibit A: voice recognition software. A decade ago, it was almost good enough, but not quite. And in the decade since then, it has improved greatly. And it's still almost good enough, but not quite.
You haven't addressed the fundamental hurdles that OnLive should theoretically never be able to overcome. Instead, you just ignore the problems and hand-wave them away. If the goal is faster-than-light travel, and one person can accelerate a particle to .9c, another can do .99c, and a third can later do .999c, they're getting faster. But they're not really getting any closer to faster than light travel.
In much that way, OnLive will continue to improve their service. But there are some massive barriers that they'll never be able to overcome, apart from technological advancements that don't seem to be on the horizon. For starters, they'd need to be able to reliably provide connections to their remote servers with bandwidth and latency comparable to the internal components of a single computer communicating with each other. I don't see that happening, ever. The prospects for faster-than-light data transmission are better than that.
"Hell, if they made a version that would run PC games on Android / iphones, they could rake in the cash."
How many of those Android/iPhone users have data packages that make them not particularly care if they use 1 GB in a typical hour?
"sooo onlive is basicly the netflix of video games ?"
NetFlix has some huge advantages over OnLive. For starters, you can download a movie you want to see well ahead of time. That allows compression across time, rather than having to compress each frame individually and send it. That means that the data compression can be vastly better.
Another advantage is that NetFlix has no concept of input latency. If you're watching a movie and it takes a couple of seconds to start after you click play, you don't particularly care. If you're playing a game and it takes two seconds for anything you do to take effect, then the game is probably completely unplayable. Now, OnLive can keep input latency a lot lower than two seconds. By my point is, NetFlix can completely ignore it and it doesn't matter.
"will cloud gaming work? eventually. when fiber makes its way to homes. but that "last mile" is way too expensive for any cable/telco to undertake for any large scale deployment. that is an ECONOMIC limitation NOT a technological limitation. eventually, when we all get a gig pipe coming to the house, i'll give this cloud gaming another look, but as far as today?"
Right now, ISPs are based on a business model of, lots of people can have a fast connection if they don't use it very much. To make up some numbers, maybe an ISP with 1 Gbps of bandwidth to the Internet proper can have 5000 customers and promise them all 10 Mbps of bandwidth each. It works if nearly all of their connections are nearly idle (e.g., web browsing or online gaming, let alone actually idle) most of the time. But it would completely fall apart if they all tried to use all of that bandwidth at once, which is what OnLive would push them toward.
Do you see ISPs moving away from that model? I don't unless they're forced to by consumer demand. And you'd better believe that if the ISP has to have 10 Gbps of bandwidth to the Internet proper rather than 1 Gbps for the same 5000 customers at the same nominal 10 Mbps each, then prices are going way, way up.
"And I realize that you can make a decent PC for around $500 and a really awesome tower for $800+, but the guy I was responding to wants the bleeding edge and that cost serious bank"
Sure, if you want the high end, that's expensive. But my point isn't merely that OnLive can't compete with the high end. It's that it can't compete with modern integrated graphics, either. That is, it can't compete with the low end. I linked a $500 laptop earlier in this thread running integrated graphics that would completely destroy OnLive in gaming image quality, in addition to avoiding the input latency problems.
"Why would I pour money into a huge tower that causes my block to brown out every time I turn it on when I could just pay $7 bucks and play a game from a similar system streamed to my netbook or iPad?"
Speaking of which, you know that $500 laptop I linked earlier? That's got a 35 W TDP for the processor, graphics, northbridge, and memory controllers, combined. That's not going to make things brown out. That laptop under a gaming load might well use less power than your desktop does at completely idle.
"but the bulk of gaming will be streamed in the future."
There are different kinds of streaming. There games that stream data to you as you need it, and then the game is rendered locally. I expect that to become more common in the future. But that's an entirely different critter from rendering the screen remotely and streaming that to you in real time. As far as I know, OnLive is the only company trying to do that over the Internet proper, as opposed to a simpler LAN.
"I can't help but think that streaming would work beautifully with retro games. Doom, Quake, Warcraft 2, just about any SNES or Sega Genesis game, all ran at 320X240 or lower resolution."
Sure, those would be easier to stream. But why would you? Typical SNES or Sega Genesis games were something like 2 MB for the entire game, and I'm not aware of any that were more than 5 MB. If you go back a little further, Super Mario Bros. was 32 KB. The processing power needed is orders of magnitude less than modern netbooks have, though you do lose some of that advantage from emulation. It would probably take more processing power to decompress the streamed video than to just run the game locally.
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mm poster:if 64 bit is any indication(can you name 10 64 bit game that were made from start with 64 bit in mind and not an old game modded to 64 bit>)i sure cant.so hardware might go to the moon but the sad truth is dev stick very close to console in term of setting.onlive and other service like this might change that tho cause when the dev make say a 64 bit game he had to bother with all kind of data like intel.amd.nvidia etc.but with service as onlive game dev like blizzrd etc will be inclined to do the highest they possibly can cause they know a server specificly made for this type of thing will be doing the work .the main trouble in the past was the variety of device but with thing like onlive(if it works )everage user can pretty much access the service via anything since it is streaming ,as we know intel has been working very hard to give the best experience in that area ,arent they releasing 4k x4k support soon?
onlive via 4k x 4k screen mm some game might be interesting in those big screen size lol
Maybe you'd like to define "very near horizon". Are we talking in the next 2 years? Next 5 years? Next ten years?
Anything less than 5 years and I'll say you're being optimistic. Next ten years? Possibly.
When OnLive can play games at 5280x1080 and I can choose wether or not and I get to choose which kind of Antil Aliasing or DX11 effects I play with etc etc etc then I *might* consider it.
Until then, I will continue to use my own PC which doubles as my work machine as well as my entertainment.
I would say that with Windows 8 and the next major Mac OS overhaul coming in late 2012/early 2013 and giving time for the new features to catch on 5 years would be well within the realm of possibilities. Change is slow even in the computer industry but the cloud computing revolution has already started. We are witnessing the begining of a shift in the industry. Within the next 5-10 years I would expect to see at least 80%-90% of what is now stored locally shifted over to the cloud. Yes they have been talking about it for a very long time but now the technology is finally catching up to the point that they can actually do it. The On-Live service is one of the pioneers of this revolution. Expect to see more and more of this in the years to come in every aspect of data and program storage.
Bren
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You sir, are a technophile. I would go so far as to say that you're a complete graphics whore, but I'm not sure how you would take that.
At any rate, you represent an extreme niche market. When we start using terms like 'best' we tend to forget that 'best' is a subjective / situational term. "Best" for whom exactly? You base your entire decision on the picture fidelity. Not the gameplay. Not even the number of actual polygons that make up the scene. Just the number of pixels and the frame rate.
Seriously, a rig that would run Crysis at those settings would cost several thousand dollars. The monitor alone would probably cost as much as my last laptop. Even among people that have that much money to burn, those willing to drop that kind of money on a gaming rig is very, very low. And the potential game sales to that market doesn't justify the enourmous cost of developing for that market.
Guess what the best selling game platform is in Brazil. Done?
It's the Sega Master System. Toy companies have made buckets of cash knocking off the SMS in South America for decades. In a country where the income of most people has been less than $500 a month, even the poorest people can scrape together $50 for a clone system with some built in games. The practice has even come to the U.S. in the form of Famiclones like the FC Twin and Retron 3.
The point is, not everyone is like you. Not everyone has, or is willing to part with, the kind of cash needed for such high end toys. And not everyone values the same things in gaming as you.
Get over yourself.
hehehe he's the kind of "dying breed" that helped build the cloud environment:D it's funny that people keep spitting out catch phrases like "cloud computing" and have absolutly no idea how the technology works and the problems clouds have:D you might want to take a few years and learn about computers and how it works before TRYING to insult someone who actually knows how the technology works:D
I have a BS(4 year degree) in Information Technology... How's your education? I know full well how Cloud Computing works. Do you?
Bren
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I worked in the IT industry for over 15 years and have consulted for many networks and builds:D just because you've taken a few classes on C++ doesnt mean you've actually been in the trenchs and saw how bleeding edge technology works. have you ever worked with alpha versions of a firmware because the beta versions just doesnt work?:D I worked with clouds before it was even called clouds... yes it was called clustering back in the day. have YOU studied how much bandwidth it would take to make cloud gaming actually work properly? do you even know the bandwidth requirements of 1080p gaming even on something as low as 30hz? do you even know what the current network limitations are for cloud computing?
If someone would have asked me if something like On-Live or any live streaming applications over the Internet was possible as little as 5 years ago I would have sounded a lot like you are now. I would have told them, "Impossible, not for at least another 15-20 years!". A lot has changed and the technology behind these types of services has advanced dramatically in the last 5 years. If these advancements continue at the same rate all of your arguments will be nullified in the very near future.
Bren
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Ummmm.....no.
For $800 I can and recently DID build a system that will crush any game you throw at it.
People claiming that this cloud computing thing is going to change GAMING are delusional. Nvidia and ATI are not going to be closing up shop any time soon. SSD drives are not going to become obsolete just as they are gaining a foothold.
Cloud computing will be handy for movies and music, document sharing, etc. But for PC GAMING, the future still lies in hardware and purchased software.
PC hardware is getting cheaper than ever, and you don't need bleeding edge hardware to max out the newest games.
Now, Onlive is probably a great thing for people with old hardware, or a netbook or something. Hell, if they made a version that would run PC games on Android / iphones, they could rake in the cash.
It IS a good idea, but it will never replace a real gaming rig.
sooo onlive is basicly the netflix of video games ???? a tad more advanced steam??
i find it odd how they can claim i can play any game i want on pc or mac... but what happens if the game i want to play is mac only or pc only?? wouldnt that make their claim a farce??
and for that matter.. what kind of actual system is this?? a live stream??? peer to peer?? what?? sounds alittle too far fetched for my tastes. more so if it means i have to deal with 300+ping or what feels like it... i hate that kind of lag.
personally ill stick to my D2D/steam and physical games over something that may or may not be alittle too tempermental for my tastes of gaming enjoyment though if it manages to take off who knows what might happen a few years from now...
if countries would just fking take their balls out of their purses and lay some new netcables around the globe to make the internet faster.... this would be all the rage o-o
I don't know how to break it to you but my PC is not worth thousands of dollars if we go by current prices.
I've said this before but I will repeat here, buying into a High-End PC is indeed expensive but it is no where near as expensive to maintain than many people believe. If you wanted my PC today, starting from scratch, then yeah you would need to pay a fair bit. But in two years when you go to upgrade it you find you don't need a new Keyboard/Mouse/Monitors/Tower etc etc etc because you bought the right kind of parts first time around. And the parts you do replace you can sell on to friends/ebay/whatever so you don't need to pay full price on your new stuff.
In replying to my post you completely missed my point as well, it isn't about being in the super duper niche market of people who play at a gajillion pixels per inch and must run at twelve thousand fps.. It's about having the flexiblity to be able to control the environment you play in. If I play EVE then normal Anti Aliasing just doesn't deal very well with jaggies on stationary objects, can OnLive turn on MLAA or SSAA to fix that? Can it turn on and off Ambient Occlusion? What about other DX features? What resolutions can I play at? Do I get any of the in game achievements credited to my account?
You're putting all your eggs into someone elses basket.. at least if you own the game and own a PC that can play said game then you are in full control of the entire experience from start to finish. It is a very nice feature, being able to play games via the cloud, but it will not be the ground breaking genre changing force that a lot of people are claiming.
As for niche market... Tell that to the other three people who live here, or the other 6 or 7 guys in my work who are all waiting for Battlefield 3 to come out.
"the tech" hasn't cought up as much as you'd think. there is only so much you can do with compression. when you play on the cloud, you are essentially getting a HD stream of the images processed by the cloud. that amount of bandwidth is neither cheap nor avaliable to the consumers yet.
even something as simple as watching a HD movie stream from home still require some kind of buffering.... buffering CAN'T happen when you are talking about gaming... gaming requires instantaneous rendering of images according to YOUR actions on the controls... sure you can "stream" a turn based game like chess or civ5, but you arent going to stream something as complicated as FPS or RTS at any resonable framerate. the "last mile" of internet is still copper. you can only push copper so far just like you can only push compression so far before your "netbook" cant even handle the rendering of images from a compressed source...
will cloud gaming work? eventually. when fiber makes its way to homes. but that "last mile" is way too expensive for any cable/telco to undertake for any large scale deployment. that is an ECONOMIC limitation NOT a technological limitation. eventually, when we all get a gig pipe coming to the house, i'll give this cloud gaming another look, but as far as today? i'll just remind you that even HDMI 1.0 spec calls for 4.9Gbit/S bandwidth...
Please. Give us the parts list.
Then again, it wouldn't do any good. You see the highest monitor resolution I was able to find was 1080p. The most expensive monitor on Newegg doesn't even have the resolution that he's banging on about. Of course, I may be reading it wrong and he's talking about THREE monitors at the same time. In which case, my point is still valid since he/she will have sank at least $600 into the display alone.
And I realize that you can make a decent PC for around $500 and a really awesome tower for $800+, but the guy I was responding to wants the bleeding edge and that cost serious bank.
And for the majority of gamers, cloud computing WILL be the future. There will still be some companies, mostly indies, making download only games that you have to install, but the bulk of gaming will be streamed in the future.
Why would I pour money into a huge tower that causes my block to brown out every time I turn it on when I could just pay $7 bucks and play a game from a similar system streamed to my netbook or iPad? The price of game hardware remains roughly the same, but the cost of gaming actually goes down. Cloud computing is just one more milestone on that road.
cloud computing is platform independent because it basiclly processes the game on the server then send you a stream of images to be displayed on your screen. when you move in the game, your movements are sent to the server, the server render the image with your movements, then send the image back to your computer for display. you can see the downfall of that when you have a lost packet of a high ping:)
the technology isnt there yet. they are just starting threads like this to try to generate hype. it's part of their marketing strategy even tho the tech just isnt there yet.
Try On-Live for yourself. I wouldn't have believed it possible either before I experienced it first hand (I was one of it's biggest opponents before I tried it quoting just about every argument you've put forward here). The very existance of it nullifies most of your arguments here. Gamestop and a few other companies are already trying to copy it. On-live isn't perfect i'll admit but it is a huge leap forward in cloud gaming.
Bren
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OnLive definitely makes some tradeoffs. The image is actually 480i widescreen. This is basically the reason they can get away with what they do. The images lose fidelity over their local installed cousins, but the games are completely playable. The only time I noticed any over significant frame loss was while Playing Pure. Incidentally, the quality of that youtube video is about the same as the image quality on OnLive.
I can't help but think that streaming would work beautifully with retro games. Doom, Quake, Warcraft 2, just about any SNES or Sega Genesis game, all ran at 320X240 or lower resolution. With a broadband connection, streaming those games would be nothing. You could probably even go as high as 800X600 and stream Quake 3 real-time. The tech is not as far behind as you think it is.
Cloud gaming is the future of gaming, but it just isn't viable yet. The U.S. network just isn't fast enough yet. Once it is,
then it will be able to play cloud gaming without too much difficulty. I see OnLive as a "proof of concept" but nothing more.
We are about five years away from it from moving from the "tolerable" to the "fully playable" phase. However, the entire nation is in danger of complete finanacial collapse before then, so we may never see it.
Question about Onlive if someone doesnt mind answering. I see its around 9 bucks a month but THAT is only for Playback Bundle games NOT new releases right? If you want the new releases does that mean you have to buy them or rent them for a few days?
Any help would be great. You can send me a private mail if this question is off topic from the forum.
Thanks in advance
Juggie
CPU-HP Omen 17.3" Laptop i7 12 GB AMD Radeon RX580 1 TB Hard Drive
As far as I can tell, it depends on the game.
Some of the games are included in the bundle. Some of the games allow three or five day rentals. And some of the games require you pay for the game. There isn't any consistency about this either.
You don't have to pay for the monthly sub, but some games are ONLY available through the sub. You can rent some games, but not all of them. Still other games can be bought retail price, but you can't get them through the sub or renting them. You just have to browse the marketplace and find out.
For me, there are enough games that I can rent for five days that I can get through until I have a new game rig built.
yes you have to buy them or rent them.plus the 9 $ monthly to stream on your netbook that can barelly play maplestory.
Okay thank you for the reply. So basically as long as I have the app on my comp I dont not need to Subscribe. I can just rent games that I want to play. I wasnt sure if it was a flat fee of 9 bucks + any rented newer games So I can basically get away with spending 5 bucks a month just to play a game for 3 days. Sadly, most console games last only a few days so it saves me from buying them. Do you recommend getting the Playback with those games or are they really not worth the 9 day a month fee?
CPU-HP Omen 17.3" Laptop i7 12 GB AMD Radeon RX580 1 TB Hard Drive
I prefer console or PC. I do use Onlive on occasion...mostly to check out demos without major load times. Both the demos and full game sI've played ran pretty well in my case. No noticeable lag for about 99% of the time. The only complaint is that it looks like your looking at a video of a game being played (which I guess is exactly what's happening)...like a thin milky screen has been placed over your monitor.
What kind of connection to you have? I played Borderlands and Unreal Tournament 3 through OnLive without a hitch.
Way to not even address the argument. Come back when OnLive offers better image quality than Radeon HD 6620G integrated graphics. That may or may not ever happen, but if it does, it will be so far in the future that virtually everyone will have better graphics by then anyway.
Cloud computing does make a ton of sense for some purposes, such as word processing or e-mail in some (many, but not all) circumstances. But in programs like that, the screen isn't being rendered remotely an then streamed to you as a video. The data is saved remotely, and the little bit of data you need is sent to you, and then rendered locally. That is, it's more analogous to online games where the game server keeps track of what is going on in the world, but the image on your screen is rendered locally.
"I hope you can bring that fast rig of yours around when you're out of the country..or even out of your home for longer than a weekend."
You know what I tend not to have when I travel like that? A high speed, stable Internet connection as needed for OnLive to work properly.
"Even so, ever heard of thresholds? Whilst I haven't read the study the original poster mentions, it's entirely possible for there to be such a threshold and even for it to be around 85ms."
Actually, let's try a simple thought experiment. An 85 ms delay between frames corresponds to less than 12 frames per second. Try playing a game at 12 frames per second and see how it goes. That will be fine for some fully turn-based games. But for many, that's completely unplayable.
"Yes they have been talking about it for a very long time but now the technology is finally catching up to the point that they can actually do it."
They can make it kind of work. Just not well enough to be competitive with modern integrated graphics. And it's very unlikely that they ever will be able to compete with modern integrated graphics. So they can make it work, but not well enough to have much a point outside of a niche market that is going to keep right on shrinking.
"In a country where the income of most people has been less than $500 a month, even the poorest people can scrape together $50 for a clone system with some built in games."
That's kind of my point: how will such people afford a $50/month Internet connection to run OnLive? Most of the people who can afford a system to run OnLive properly can do better by spending the same money elsewhere. And in coming years, that is going to move from "most" to "essentially all".
"I would have told them, "Impossible, not for at least another 15-20 years!". A lot has changed and the technology behind these types of services has advanced dramatically in the last 5 years."
There's an enormous chasm between "kind of works, but not as well as the alternatives" and "works well enough to be better than the atlernatives". Exhibit A: voice recognition software. A decade ago, it was almost good enough, but not quite. And in the decade since then, it has improved greatly. And it's still almost good enough, but not quite.
You haven't addressed the fundamental hurdles that OnLive should theoretically never be able to overcome. Instead, you just ignore the problems and hand-wave them away. If the goal is faster-than-light travel, and one person can accelerate a particle to .9c, another can do .99c, and a third can later do .999c, they're getting faster. But they're not really getting any closer to faster than light travel.
In much that way, OnLive will continue to improve their service. But there are some massive barriers that they'll never be able to overcome, apart from technological advancements that don't seem to be on the horizon. For starters, they'd need to be able to reliably provide connections to their remote servers with bandwidth and latency comparable to the internal components of a single computer communicating with each other. I don't see that happening, ever. The prospects for faster-than-light data transmission are better than that.
"Hell, if they made a version that would run PC games on Android / iphones, they could rake in the cash."
How many of those Android/iPhone users have data packages that make them not particularly care if they use 1 GB in a typical hour?
"sooo onlive is basicly the netflix of video games ?"
NetFlix has some huge advantages over OnLive. For starters, you can download a movie you want to see well ahead of time. That allows compression across time, rather than having to compress each frame individually and send it. That means that the data compression can be vastly better.
Another advantage is that NetFlix has no concept of input latency. If you're watching a movie and it takes a couple of seconds to start after you click play, you don't particularly care. If you're playing a game and it takes two seconds for anything you do to take effect, then the game is probably completely unplayable. Now, OnLive can keep input latency a lot lower than two seconds. By my point is, NetFlix can completely ignore it and it doesn't matter.
"will cloud gaming work? eventually. when fiber makes its way to homes. but that "last mile" is way too expensive for any cable/telco to undertake for any large scale deployment. that is an ECONOMIC limitation NOT a technological limitation. eventually, when we all get a gig pipe coming to the house, i'll give this cloud gaming another look, but as far as today?"
Right now, ISPs are based on a business model of, lots of people can have a fast connection if they don't use it very much. To make up some numbers, maybe an ISP with 1 Gbps of bandwidth to the Internet proper can have 5000 customers and promise them all 10 Mbps of bandwidth each. It works if nearly all of their connections are nearly idle (e.g., web browsing or online gaming, let alone actually idle) most of the time. But it would completely fall apart if they all tried to use all of that bandwidth at once, which is what OnLive would push them toward.
Do you see ISPs moving away from that model? I don't unless they're forced to by consumer demand. And you'd better believe that if the ISP has to have 10 Gbps of bandwidth to the Internet proper rather than 1 Gbps for the same 5000 customers at the same nominal 10 Mbps each, then prices are going way, way up.
"And I realize that you can make a decent PC for around $500 and a really awesome tower for $800+, but the guy I was responding to wants the bleeding edge and that cost serious bank"
Sure, if you want the high end, that's expensive. But my point isn't merely that OnLive can't compete with the high end. It's that it can't compete with modern integrated graphics, either. That is, it can't compete with the low end. I linked a $500 laptop earlier in this thread running integrated graphics that would completely destroy OnLive in gaming image quality, in addition to avoiding the input latency problems.
"Why would I pour money into a huge tower that causes my block to brown out every time I turn it on when I could just pay $7 bucks and play a game from a similar system streamed to my netbook or iPad?"
Speaking of which, you know that $500 laptop I linked earlier? That's got a 35 W TDP for the processor, graphics, northbridge, and memory controllers, combined. That's not going to make things brown out. That laptop under a gaming load might well use less power than your desktop does at completely idle.
"but the bulk of gaming will be streamed in the future."
There are different kinds of streaming. There games that stream data to you as you need it, and then the game is rendered locally. I expect that to become more common in the future. But that's an entirely different critter from rendering the screen remotely and streaming that to you in real time. As far as I know, OnLive is the only company trying to do that over the Internet proper, as opposed to a simpler LAN.
"I can't help but think that streaming would work beautifully with retro games. Doom, Quake, Warcraft 2, just about any SNES or Sega Genesis game, all ran at 320X240 or lower resolution."
Sure, those would be easier to stream. But why would you? Typical SNES or Sega Genesis games were something like 2 MB for the entire game, and I'm not aware of any that were more than 5 MB. If you go back a little further, Super Mario Bros. was 32 KB. The processing power needed is orders of magnitude less than modern netbooks have, though you do lose some of that advantage from emulation. It would probably take more processing power to decompress the streamed video than to just run the game locally.