For MMORPGs it's not a big deal. You play an MMORPG on someone elses server already. This set up for an MMORPG doesn't really change that much.
What are you really gaining when you play an MMORPG from running the client on your home computer? Nothing really. And what about second hand sales? You can still turn over your account to someone to selll your character in an MMORPG. And most of the value of an MMORPG box is gone after you buy it anyways, because you use up the free month that comes with it.
For single player games it's a different story. This is a way for developers to get some serious copy right protection. It's much harder to steal the software when you never have it in the first place.
Yeah, MMORPGs obviously already use this business model, which is fine. What isn't fine, from my perspective, is the way the games industry is desperately searching for ways to transition to a subscription/recurring revenue model for ALL games, even crappy single-player titles with some tacked on expansion content that costs virtually nothing to produce.
See the way EA is trying to turn the Tiger Woods series into a subscription based game for an example.
I understand the mentality, I'm a small business owner of a company that deals in services, and recurring revenue is the holy grail, but you've got to have something worthwhile for people to subscribe to, otherwise you alienate people with your greed.
At the end of the day, its their prerogative to do that, just as its my prerogative to find something else to do with my entertainment dollar.
It sure would be nice if game developers didn't have to worry about 2,346,634,672 different OS/Hardware configurations and had to program their games for the lowest common denominator.
For a lot of applications (especially mmos) it looks like a winning formula to me.
The only problem is for HD video you need a 4-5 Mbps connection and only 25% of americian internet connections are that fast.
This is one reason High end computers are not dead due to this system as while only 25% of Americans have access to the bandwidth needed to get HD games but in Europe and anywhere else the percentage is even less.
Also another reason against it right now is that you cant buy the games you can only rent them. So you will in the end pay more for the same games you could have brought for one lump sum.
The biggest obsticle tho i feel is the state of the broadband system in some areas around the world as in its not there yet. For example where i live the fastest bandwidth i can get is 1.5 - 2 meg depending on how many are using it at the time. Not that im saying i wouldnt be interested in this system its just that im not sure if the infestructure is there yet to support it afterall imagine palying something like Defcon in single player only to get lag part way through!!!!
Another great example of Moore's Law. Give people access to that much space (developers and users alike) and they'll find uses for it that you can never imagine. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates 1981
Summary: Onlive makes it possible to play any game, Yes even Crysis, on any computer (or tv with a micro-gaming console). Yes now you can play Crysis on Max settings on that $300 netbook you just bought! Alas, high end computers are now dead. Link to Onlive website: http://www.onlive.com/
And while you're there, they'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, too! Very reasonable price!
Slaves, you have no ownership and therefore no rights.
Who wants ownership of the new games that are out/coming out anyways? I certainly don't. In fact, I kind of wish I could un-do most of the video game spending I've done in the last 2 years or so.
My list of "favorite/best 20ish games ever" hasn't changed at all in the last 4 years, or much at all in the last decade. I find it unlikely that the next decade will bring anything better than what I've all ready got installed and running on my 8-year-old laptop.
Its just that if for any reason you don't pay their subscription fees, or your broadband fees you lose the games you like too.
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion." -Edmund Burke
Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? or who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?" (Psalm 94:16)
Also another reason against it right now is that you cant buy the games you can only rent them. So you will in the end pay more for the same games you could have brought for one lump sum.
A bit offtopic but most games are not worth their MSRP. At least with console games, if it can't provide more then 6 months of game time it's not a better value then a rental.
I don't see this taking off anytime soon. 20 years from now, maybe. Infant technology like this never catches on. Actual, usable, marketable implementation usually lags by a good 10 years.
Originally posted by Thradar I don't see this taking off anytime soon. 20 years from now, maybe. Infant technology like this never catches on. Actual, usable, marketable implementation usually lags by a good 10 years.
I have doubts he'll ever be able to do it, at least for certain types of games, including Crysis. Anything more than a few milliseconds of lag in the controls makes twitch games unplayable, and he's not going to be able to get the lag small enough; he's got the lightspeed limit dragging him down on any such remote implementation. Remember, every 186 miles is 2 milliseconds of lag, guaranteed, and in fact he'll never get close to that. And that's *additional* load added to whatever it takes him to do computations at each end.
I seriously doubt this will live up to what it claims it can be.
Even if they could.
Which ISP is going to support this? That's thousands of TB of data each second, it would put enormous pressure on the internet, no ISP is ready for that or would want to support that.
Well, it will be nice, but I dont think it will be the death of computers quite yet.
The technology is still young, and dependant on the connection.
For example large scale lan parties, The internet couldnt support that many people in one area.
Small scale lan parties, 1 person is enough to bottleneck the connection at Standard def, if you have more than one person in a household you won't be able to play.
They are laying the ground work for the future, but I think we have a looong way to go before this is a fully viable replacement for computer gaming.
We don't have the infrastructure (at this time) for this to work in many situaitons.
after 6 or so years, I had to change it a little...
I really can't see that thing working properly. If it does, that would be amazing, but I have my doubts.
The concept itself has already worked, Quake 3 Live used it, it's called cloud computing.
Basically a server runs the game and streams everything. Now if this thing will work is a whole other thing, because this isn't just a small game like Quake 3 Live and this isn't just 1 game. Even Quake 3 Live had a lot of issues and the rendering was still done on the client PC.
ALSO, the title is kinda silly OP....computer upgrades not being needed would be a boost for computer gaming, not making them dead.
Quakelive is just a plugin for your browser, the game is installed in your pc, actually it has all the baseq3 etc as the original quake 3. It does not stream more than a normal server streams, aka it just updates the coordinates, your client then calculates a trajectory based on the info it gets. There is 0 input lag, hence you probably only need 15k/sec download for this to work well (and minor upload).
Also they can t reduce ping, there is a physical limitation on how fast packets can travel (hence why they will even have servers on multiple US zones...) or light for example, the input lag will be noticed (we are used to close to 0 ms in our pcs). Some people could notice the input lag during the demonstration just by watching, now the input lag might be doable for many games, but i doubt it will be good for fast online fps games like quake/ut.
Also broadband is not equal to ping/response times, it is needed, however, for the amount of info that needs to be streamed. I had pings below 40 with old isdn back then.
The guys that made OnLive clearly do not understand the nature of the internet. it was not made to be quick point a to b, it was made for redundant communication. Every router between me and their server adds 2-10ms depending on how busy it is. That alone will make this flop, but the capital involved in purchasing the hardware so thousands or millions of users is absurd. $500 a person would be a very conservative estimate (power, bandwidth, hardware costs, administrative, etc etc). So, assuming $30 a month subscription fee, that's 16 months before they see a profit on you. i Highly doubt they could survive that long..... Now, if these guys can built their own "internet" optimized for speed, then we may have something.
If it works as intended it is a revolution of gaming.
Developers will be able to create their games without worrying about low-end specs (or even the high-end ones, after all they will just need the supercomputers running the servers, consumer worry equals zero), they can really go full-out on their games and also update them.
For MMOs this may also be an evolution if the game server is actually the MMO server you will make the latency from input and server answer equal, if this is close to zero, then it's an epic win.
The internet should be almost ready for it, although I see myself excluded from this initially, playing from Brazil on US servers would give a 200 ms latency, but I wish good luck to this project so it may expand to other countries.
I can't see it working though if they don't have their own optimized network though, if you rely on public jumps you're too susceptible to fail.
It's not, not even close. Remember how upset ISP were when the BBC launched their little media player so people could watch streaming video..that was in abysmal quality. How will ISP feel if people are streaming high rez video and clogging up the internet 24/7. You're talking about every gamer streaming HD video 24/7....that's a ridiculous load which would just bring the internet down in places they use it. ISP would just block this service just like they blocked the BBC.
Another thing, all the PC's or servers which you would need. You can't use regular servers for this, since most don't have graphics capabilities..so you're going to need a high-end PC for each and every gamer..that would be bigger than Google's server farm. On top of that you would need to encode every frame of video before you send it out.
Then lag, they would need to
*play the game on the server
*encode the video
*send the video over to your place
*decode the video
*show the video to you
*poll for input
*send the input back to the server and send it to the game on the server
And they claim they can do this in 1ms....lol much.
It just can't work if you give it 2 minutes of thought.
There's no way. This reads like an ad, not an article, and if there's on thing I've learned from all my years in gaming is that marketese is always, always, always bullshit.
Sounds like a good idea but the technical hurdles will make this useful for a miniscule minority of internet users, if it works at all.
Networking is hard. Do anyone here know the whoes tryiing to have multiplayer games in Demigod? even people tryiing to download stuff can have problems. Also, networking is slow. It adds latency to everything. So to avoid that, any online game runs the phisics on the clientside, and have something called movement prediction... so this part of the game let you move withouth the server permision, of course, movements that are not really allowed serverside are "forget" or "fixed". Thats how all Online games work. This thing don't run like that, so it needs to send your output to the server. This adds about 100 or 200 ms of lag to your imput. You will feel like a drunk guy, the game will feel unresponsive and way hard to use. Imagine using a mouse cursor, the mouse will fell like having "innertia" at itself, so the simple thing of clicking on the button will be a "click and miss" epic thing. It will be almost imposible mission to click on a button with a mouse cursor . For something like table games, or watching porn, etc... is a good idea, but its advertised for games, that is exactly the application where this technology can't work.
"What about lag, you say? OnLive's technology "incubator" Rearden Studios claims that its servers will deliver video feeds that have a ping of less than one millisecond."
That is absolutely, 100% bullshit. No way around it. First of all, by the laws of Physics, this is only possible if you live 186 miles or closer to their server. Secondly, their "technology" has absolutely no control over the performance of ISP's service.
Just think about your average latency to a game, anywhere from 30ms - 200ms depending on your service provider and where you are connecting too. That delay is no longer going to be server details which can easily be predicted to avoid jumpyness, but that delay is going to be the delay in your commands going to the server, and the frames being sent back.
I think it's a pretty stupid idea, it won't perform how they claim, and completely removes the ownership of software.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike Loved: Star Wars Galaxies Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
I think it's a pretty stupid idea, it won't perform how they claim, and completely removes the ownership of software.
Wow. That's one thing I didn't realized before. That you really dont have the software at all, not in a cd, or in digtal format, but just a mere image of it on your screen, so who's to say you truley own it?
I think it's a pretty stupid idea, it won't perform how they claim, and completely removes the ownership of software.
Wow. That's one thing I didn't realized before. That you really dont have the software at all, not in a cd, or in digtal format, but just a mere image of it on your screen, so who's to say you truley own it?
Basically, you don't, you are just renting it from them. This will make it so that your entire play experience with every game is completely controlled by them.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike Loved: Star Wars Galaxies Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
Comments
For MMORPGs it's not a big deal. You play an MMORPG on someone elses server already. This set up for an MMORPG doesn't really change that much.
What are you really gaining when you play an MMORPG from running the client on your home computer? Nothing really. And what about second hand sales? You can still turn over your account to someone to selll your character in an MMORPG. And most of the value of an MMORPG box is gone after you buy it anyways, because you use up the free month that comes with it.
For single player games it's a different story. This is a way for developers to get some serious copy right protection. It's much harder to steal the software when you never have it in the first place.
Yeah, MMORPGs obviously already use this business model, which is fine. What isn't fine, from my perspective, is the way the games industry is desperately searching for ways to transition to a subscription/recurring revenue model for ALL games, even crappy single-player titles with some tacked on expansion content that costs virtually nothing to produce.
See the way EA is trying to turn the Tiger Woods series into a subscription based game for an example.
I understand the mentality, I'm a small business owner of a company that deals in services, and recurring revenue is the holy grail, but you've got to have something worthwhile for people to subscribe to, otherwise you alienate people with your greed.
At the end of the day, its their prerogative to do that, just as its my prerogative to find something else to do with my entertainment dollar.
It sure would be nice if game developers didn't have to worry about 2,346,634,672 different OS/Hardware configurations and had to program their games for the lowest common denominator.
For a lot of applications (especially mmos) it looks like a winning formula to me.
This is one reason High end computers are not dead due to this system as while only 25% of Americans have access to the bandwidth needed to get HD games but in Europe and anywhere else the percentage is even less.
Also another reason against it right now is that you cant buy the games you can only rent them. So you will in the end pay more for the same games you could have brought for one lump sum.
The biggest obsticle tho i feel is the state of the broadband system in some areas around the world as in its not there yet. For example where i live the fastest bandwidth i can get is 1.5 - 2 meg depending on how many are using it at the time. Not that im saying i wouldnt be interested in this system its just that im not sure if the infestructure is there yet to support it afterall imagine palying something like Defcon in single player only to get lag part way through!!!!
Another great example of Moore's Law. Give people access to that much space (developers and users alike) and they'll find uses for it that you can never imagine. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates 1981
And while you're there, they'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, too! Very reasonable price!
Who wants ownership of the new games that are out/coming out anyways? I certainly don't. In fact, I kind of wish I could un-do most of the video game spending I've done in the last 2 years or so.
My list of "favorite/best 20ish games ever" hasn't changed at all in the last 4 years, or much at all in the last decade. I find it unlikely that the next decade will bring anything better than what I've all ready got installed and running on my 8-year-old laptop.
Its just that if for any reason you don't pay their subscription fees, or your broadband fees you lose the games you like too.
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion." -Edmund Burke
Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? or who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?"
(Psalm 94:16)
A bit offtopic but most games are not worth their MSRP. At least with console games, if it can't provide more then 6 months of game time it's not a better value then a rental.
I seriously doubt this will live up to what it claims it can be.
I don't see this taking off anytime soon. 20 years from now, maybe. Infant technology like this never catches on. Actual, usable, marketable implementation usually lags by a good 10 years.
I have doubts he'll ever be able to do it, at least for certain types of games, including Crysis. Anything more than a few milliseconds of lag in the controls makes twitch games unplayable, and he's not going to be able to get the lag small enough; he's got the lightspeed limit dragging him down on any such remote implementation. Remember, every 186 miles is 2 milliseconds of lag, guaranteed, and in fact he'll never get close to that. And that's *additional* load added to whatever it takes him to do computations at each end.
Even if they could.
Which ISP is going to support this? That's thousands of TB of data each second, it would put enormous pressure on the internet, no ISP is ready for that or would want to support that.
Well, it will be nice, but I dont think it will be the death of computers quite yet.
The technology is still young, and dependant on the connection.
For example large scale lan parties, The internet couldnt support that many people in one area.
Small scale lan parties, 1 person is enough to bottleneck the connection at Standard def, if you have more than one person in a household you won't be able to play.
They are laying the ground work for the future, but I think we have a looong way to go before this is a fully viable replacement for computer gaming.
We don't have the infrastructure (at this time) for this to work in many situaitons.
after 6 or so years, I had to change it a little...
This made me laugh.
-In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08-
|
RISING DRAGOON ~AION US ONLINE LEGION for Elyos
The concept itself has already worked, Quake 3 Live used it, it's called cloud computing.
Basically a server runs the game and streams everything. Now if this thing will work is a whole other thing, because this isn't just a small game like Quake 3 Live and this isn't just 1 game. Even Quake 3 Live had a lot of issues and the rendering was still done on the client PC.
ALSO, the title is kinda silly OP....computer upgrades not being needed would be a boost for computer gaming, not making them dead.
Quakelive is just a plugin for your browser, the game is installed in your pc, actually it has all the baseq3 etc as the original quake 3. It does not stream more than a normal server streams, aka it just updates the coordinates, your client then calculates a trajectory based on the info it gets. There is 0 input lag, hence you probably only need 15k/sec download for this to work well (and minor upload).
Also they can t reduce ping, there is a physical limitation on how fast packets can travel (hence why they will even have servers on multiple US zones...) or light for example, the input lag will be noticed (we are used to close to 0 ms in our pcs). Some people could notice the input lag during the demonstration just by watching, now the input lag might be doable for many games, but i doubt it will be good for fast online fps games like quake/ut.
Also broadband is not equal to ping/response times, it is needed, however, for the amount of info that needs to be streamed. I had pings below 40 with old isdn back then.
"My Fantasy is having two men at once...
One Cooking and One Cleaning!"
---------------------------
"A good man can make you feel sexy,
strong and able to take on the whole world...
oh sorry...that's wine...wine does that..."
The guys that made OnLive clearly do not understand the nature of the internet. it was not made to be quick point a to b, it was made for redundant communication. Every router between me and their server adds 2-10ms depending on how busy it is. That alone will make this flop, but the capital involved in purchasing the hardware so thousands or millions of users is absurd. $500 a person would be a very conservative estimate (power, bandwidth, hardware costs, administrative, etc etc). So, assuming $30 a month subscription fee, that's 16 months before they see a profit on you. i Highly doubt they could survive that long..... Now, if these guys can built their own "internet" optimized for speed, then we may have something.
If it works as intended it is a revolution of gaming.
Developers will be able to create their games without worrying about low-end specs (or even the high-end ones, after all they will just need the supercomputers running the servers, consumer worry equals zero), they can really go full-out on their games and also update them.
For MMOs this may also be an evolution if the game server is actually the MMO server you will make the latency from input and server answer equal, if this is close to zero, then it's an epic win.
The internet should be almost ready for it, although I see myself excluded from this initially, playing from Brazil on US servers would give a 200 ms latency, but I wish good luck to this project so it may expand to other countries.
I can't see it working though if they don't have their own optimized network though, if you rely on public jumps you're too susceptible to fail.
If Onlive succeeds, I would expect a gigantic leap in graphics quality in the next few years.
It's not, not even close. Remember how upset ISP were when the BBC launched their little media player so people could watch streaming video..that was in abysmal quality. How will ISP feel if people are streaming high rez video and clogging up the internet 24/7. You're talking about every gamer streaming HD video 24/7....that's a ridiculous load which would just bring the internet down in places they use it. ISP would just block this service just like they blocked the BBC.
Another thing, all the PC's or servers which you would need. You can't use regular servers for this, since most don't have graphics capabilities..so you're going to need a high-end PC for each and every gamer..that would be bigger than Google's server farm. On top of that you would need to encode every frame of video before you send it out.
Then lag, they would need to
*play the game on the server
*encode the video
*send the video over to your place
*decode the video
*show the video to you
*poll for input
*send the input back to the server and send it to the game on the server
And they claim they can do this in 1ms....lol much.
It just can't work if you give it 2 minutes of thought.
There's no way. This reads like an ad, not an article, and if there's on thing I've learned from all my years in gaming is that marketese is always, always, always bullshit.
Sounds like a good idea but the technical hurdles will make this useful for a miniscule minority of internet users, if it works at all.
QFT!
That article is funny. I liked this part...
"What about lag, you say? OnLive's technology "incubator" Rearden Studios claims that its servers will deliver video feeds that have a ping of less than one millisecond."
That is absolutely, 100% bullshit. No way around it. First of all, by the laws of Physics, this is only possible if you live 186 miles or closer to their server. Secondly, their "technology" has absolutely no control over the performance of ISP's service.
Just think about your average latency to a game, anywhere from 30ms - 200ms depending on your service provider and where you are connecting too. That delay is no longer going to be server details which can easily be predicted to avoid jumpyness, but that delay is going to be the delay in your commands going to the server, and the frames being sent back.
I think it's a pretty stupid idea, it won't perform how they claim, and completely removes the ownership of software.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic
Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW
Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike
Loved: Star Wars Galaxies
Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
Wow. That's one thing I didn't realized before. That you really dont have the software at all, not in a cd, or in digtal format, but just a mere image of it on your screen, so who's to say you truley own it?
Currently restarting World of Warcraft
Wow. That's one thing I didn't realized before. That you really dont have the software at all, not in a cd, or in digtal format, but just a mere image of it on your screen, so who's to say you truley own it?
Basically, you don't, you are just renting it from them. This will make it so that your entire play experience with every game is completely controlled by them.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic
Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW
Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike
Loved: Star Wars Galaxies
Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
Also:
Relevant Penny Arcade strip
Skeptical Eurogamer Article