OnLive - Streaming PC/Console games @HD quality

[Rivero]

It seems like an interesting enough project but I don't honestly see whats the big deal in spending 500-1000 dollars for a video card. And I've been using mine for about 4-5 years with no problems. People spend way more money tunning cars or doing other hobbies.

You also need to assume this service won't be cheap so oddly enough you might wind up paying more in monthly fees compared with the cost of buying a new graphics card or hell...even a computer.

[Natallon]

signed up for beta
looks promising

[Dezzimal]

My bullshit meter is through the roof here. Even if the lag produced by video encoding is inconsequential, they still need to set up servers in optimal locations for ping times. Given that gamers nitpick about such things like LCD refresh rates >5ms its pretty safe to say that 70-100ms of input lag (remember we need to make a round trip!) is going to be very noticeable. Not to mention that streaming 1920x1080 is a fuckshiton of bandwidth.

[Cydewinder]

The guy in the video said that the max is 720p with 60 FPS.

[Nuriko]

I'm not one for understanding the economics of gaming too well, but can game companies actually make money with this? If normal games cost anywhere from $20-$50 per copy and OnLive has say 1000 members, the game company obviously isn't getting the money for 1000 copies of their game. I guess an argument could be made that those 1000 members wouldn't have bought the game anyway (either due to not having a PC up to spec, or they were just going to pirate the game anyway) so just getting anything would be profitable, but I wonder if over time more people will start using a service like this instead of buying the game thus decreasing the game companies normal sales. If that ends up being an actual trend, I'd fear for how much a service like this will end up costing. Could they end up doing a tier based service where each tier adds more games so that you'd actually have to pay a lot more for the newer/better games so OnLive can pay more back to the game companies?

[Devolver]

I'm not one for understanding the economics of gaming too well, but can game companies actually make money with this?

From what ive read, alot of the price from a game comes from the actual manufacturing/distribution of a game. Also you have to take into account the mark-ups they have to put on them for the actual stores to turn a profit.

So instead of a down-time between a finished product, and getting it to the masses, this (in theory) will be instantaneous.

Basically its cutting out 2-3 middlemen. And less hands the game has to go through, the cheaper it is for the gaming company.

[Moridam]

this is a terrible idea which i hope fails miserably

[Devolver]

this is a terrible idea which i hope fails miserably

Lol why? I think this would be a great alternative to people (like me) who dont have rigs to run awesome PC-only games

Also, this reminds me of Sega TV (if any of you remember that) and it was sooooooo great. I had it from day one, but it didn't stay active very long.

Also, if anyone can't get a grasp of how this works....this is essentially you watching a video of you playing a game.

[Bwelch]

About damn time. I wish I had FiOS in my area. ; ;

[Moridam]

Lol why? I think this would be a great alternative to people (like me) who dont have rigs to run awesome PC-only games

Also, this reminds me of Sega TV (if any of you remember that) and it was sooooooo great. I had it from day one, but it didn't stay active very long.

Also, if anyone can't get a grasp of how this works....this is essentially you watching a video of you playing a game.

well, to elaborate further on what other people have already said...

assume ideal server placement, say co-locate them at your local ISP. latency to and from the server is probably going to be ~15ms each way, and we can be extremely generous and assume they can process input, render, and encode while adding on another 30ms. in absolutely ideal circumstances (read: non-existent for 99.9% of users), you're looking at 50-70ms total latency.

if you want a 720p HD stream, you need 5mbit downstream, and if your ISP caps total transfer, well, couple hours of gaming a day is gonna add up really quickly.

say you have to pay an access fee for an individual game, independent of your onlive subscription costs. what happens to that game you paid for when the company folds? can't play it anymore? damn.

nah, i'd rather stick to discs i can hang onto, and which aren't 100% dependent on a horrendously shitty residential broadband line

terrible, terrible idea in terms of a usable product. apparently a great one for a bunch of guys who want to live off VC for a few years though!

[fantasticdan]

this is a terrible idea which i hope fails miserably

^

[Devolver]

Well I mean I understand from a technical standpoint how difficult this is to work, but why wouldn't someone WANT this to be successful? If they, in fact, have the means to pull this off, hell I would say this is pretty damn ambitious for them to come out and say all these things and be so confident about it.

[Bartylby]

god damn almost everyone in this thread is so jaded by the idea, i figure bg would be filled with people's acclamations about it.

dev's for it answering 9 questions.

[url=http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009/03/24/onlive-interview-founder-says-console-makers-cant-compete-until-2022/#more-22043]MTV Multiplayer

*edit* god damn auto editing, cut from the h to the 3 before the ]

[fantasticdan]

Well I mean I understand from a technical standpoint how difficult this is to work, but why wouldn't someone WANT this to be successful? If they, in fact, have the means to pull this off, hell I would say this is pretty damn ambitious for them to come out and say all these things and be so confident about it.

By reinventing the internet? Or did you mean with magic?

[Moridam]

their plan for dealing with bandwidth caps is apparently hoping ISP's will just be nice and not count onlive traffic against users. this company is clearly destined for glory

[Kaisha]

their plan for dealing with bandwidth caps is apparently hoping ISP's will just be nice and not count onlive traffic against users. this company is clearly destined for glory

If they've not done it yet for YouTube and premium-stream sites, they won't do it for anyone.
(I would kill for my Steam purchases to not count towards my monthly bandwidth usage)

[Waef]

Anyone know why it keeps saying "Incorrect" at the bottom whenever I try to submit my application for beta? No matter what I change, the "Incorrect" text still pops up. Halp? D:

[Jefe]

^Do you have NoScript by any chance? If you have it on, there's a captcha field that you won't be able to see, hence the error ;o

And yeah, sounds like a terribad idea to me. I still want physical copies of my shit :U

[Blabj]

Fuck you Americuh and your US only beta.

[Illek♫]

While i'd like this to work, there's so many ways for it to not work. And I'd like to have a physical copy of the disk tyvm unless games are free......