Geekshow

One of the biggest pieces of news to come out of GDC 09 was the presentation of OnLive. I'm curious to see what everyone else thinks about the technology. Obviously, it all sounds very impressive. My biggest concerns are with response time and video quality. The other issue is that just about everyone occasionally has net hiccups. Is that going to ruin the experience? Check out the link above if you haven't read anything about it.

I'm hoping that it's marketed more as a Gamefly style rental service, personally. So, losing internet access won't be such a big deal. But yeah, I'm pretty certain if you can't access the cloud computing, you can't access the games.

Have you seen what sorts of computers are available for the average user these days? We priced an $1800 computer the other night. Quad Core 2.66 processor, SLI video card with 1.8 gigs of ram, 6 gigs of ram on the computer (Upgradable to 24 gigs), 2TB of harddrive space, etc. I have no doubt in my mind that they could get some serious computer power with server towers that would serve hundreds to thousands of customers at a time. So I think it would be economically feasible to do it, but how high would it raise the subscriptions in order to pull it off?

I personally think the internet structure is in place for what they are trying to do. Take a Netflix for example. They stream HD content now, which is basically what we are talking about being the strain on the connection. The actual streaming of the input signal back to the servers in miniscule in comparison, and is something we basically already do with things like Xbox Live and PSN. However, the problem is, could you keep the streaming consistent, or would you have to do a Netflix style system of predicting the speed and quality you can support? Also, the issue with the input isn't speed, but latency. If they can overcome that problem, I totally think that the rest will work out. But if they can't, then I'm not sure what else can be done.

I have to think they are close if they are showing it off now. But it could totally end up being vaporware.

Like I said, you are basically talking about the same thing that Live does. Most FPS games on Live uses a host advantage style system. Which means, everyone sends their data to the Host (In this case, the host is much less of a powerful computing device), and the Host decides what happens in relation to the data it has (Thus giving the Host an advantage). Then the host sends data back to all the players, and their systems renders the results.

So when it comes to the processing of the game, I don't think that it will be all that bad. SLIGHTLY “laggier” than a typical game. But that's not got anything to do with actual speed.

Ultimately, the big issue will be the video streaming and balancing “Enough, but not too much” processing ability. That's something that Microsoft screwed up with the Christmas before last. Like you said, there could be an issue with the peaks of games.

As I said, I think it can be done, but we won't know for a while how good it can be done. I'm all up for it if it's similar in price and structure to Gamefly. Otherwise, I'm pretty much not interested. If it's a purchase program, it reminds me too much of the old DivX players that rightfully died.