OnLive: The Future of Gaming
This year’s GDC has just announced, what I believe to be, the biggest news in gaming since, I don’t know, the control pad. It’s a little something called OnLive.
Onlive is essentially going to change gaming the way YouTube changed everybody’s TV viewing habits. With OnLive gamers have entered the world of video game streaming. Potentially, what this means is, gamers can play any game they want on demand, anywhere they are in the world for as long as they have a computer – any computer at that – and an Internet connection to access the OnLive service. Yes, you heard that right, any computer would do. In fact, you don’t even need a computer, per se. You could opt to play games straight through your television set provided it is equipped with the OnLive hub, which essentially feeds your TV video and audio from the Internet.
One of the most exciting things about OnLive is the fact that it virtually makes the need for consoles or high-end PCs obsolete. The game is played in a remote server, and the output – essentially the video and audio of the game – is streamed to you, the end-user. So for good or for bad, if the service truly does take off, then the hardware side of the video game business will disappear in the next decade or so.
OnLive will of course charge gamers a fee to access the service. On top of that, the games will need to be “purchased” in some fashion. Gamers will have a few option when playing games. They could of course play free demos of the game. Alternatively, they can rent the full version of the game and own it for a fixed number of days. Of course they can also buy the game all together, and play it using the OnLive service indefinitely. While I do enjoy the novelty of owning something tactile with my games (ie. the packaging) there is a lot of charm in having all your games accessible right at your finger tips. No more swapping discs, and no more worrying about reaching the right specs.
OnLive
Utilizing this service should really be a no-brainer for publishers. Not only does the service improve distribution of product by making games available on-demand, it also expands the market considerably, making games available to anybody who has an Internet connection. Moreover, since users will need to log into the service, it makes the possibility of piracy almost negligible (provided that OnLive does a good job securing their site).
So that’s OnLive in a nutshell. I didn’t want to get into too much detail about the service as other sites and blogs have already dissected the hell out of it. With OnLive the arena of video games is truly changing and evolving into something more accessible and something more integrated into people’s lives. Long have I hoped for the day that video games would be as accepted as comic books, television shows and movies. I’m sick of games always being ostracized and ridiculed for loving what we love. That day has finally come… Well, actually it’ll come winter of 2009, but I can wait a little longer.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say, provided that OnLive doesn’t screw itself over by providing poor service, this is truly the future of gaming. Only a mass conspiracy amongst hardware developers (and others who would be at a disadvantage if this service does succeed), can stop this juggernaut of an idea. It’s truly an exciting time to be a gamer.
5 Responses to “OnLive: The Future of Gaming”
Leave a Reply
Statistics
I think they should start out small first by targeting the casual to mid scale market before going out for the big stuffs. Games are rather very processor and memory intensive and it would require them to have tons of processing power and one heck of an OS or OS modification to have such a service and I doubt that’s near practical to having individual consoles for the company who’s proposing it at least (Unless they have some holy grail solution to this one. Quantum Computing experiments perhaps?). On paper it looks very nice to gamers. Let’s just hope that they pull in out right.
Looks good except I just hope that publishers would still distribute games via the old fashioned way.
It’s not all the time that you are in a place where decent internet connectivity is available.
Processing power is the least of their worries. I’ve read somewhere that the recommended speed is 1.5 megabits/sec for SD and 5 megabits/sec for HD. Latency will also be an issue, unless they have servers stationed all around the globe, lag will be unacceptable for a lot of games.
I was thinking of a fully server side processing setup. But if it’s combined server side to send in load time data and client side processing for real time, it should be possible. Though that would beat the purpose of a console disregarding upgrades.
Not sure though if you’re saying the same thing. And yes bandwidth and latency is another issue.
Oops, I missed some words in my post. It should read “recommended connection speed” not just “recommended speed”