Has anyone read this article? I was told the writer, Dean Takahashi, said this “would kill game engines like Unity” which I find a bit sensationalist. Anyway, have a read for yourself, the service seems real enough.
It seems like an interactive movie to me. The central server renders the whole scene based on user input and then sends back the data to the clients.
As for this becoming a threat for conventional industry, the 2 mb/s for standard graphics and 5 mb/s is a major drawback. Also the business model is going to be a problem, the price is going to be affordable only by major publishers probably.
Anyway, i hope this will start to look like a threat to hardware manufacturers so much that they will come up with lower prices on new hardware.
Surely its just a delivery system. The games will still need to be built… and if they are good enough - a big publisher might even pick them up and put them on the Onlive service.
On the move games consoles(psp, gameboy,ds,itouch etc) will still be wanted.
I don’t think this will hurt the indy scene.
This is a delivery system, though. I don’t see how it could kill game engines, because it’s not taking the place of game engines. The games still need to be developed, and I can’t see why Unity wouldn’t be appropriate.
I think this technology definitely is the future, but not quite yet. Maybe in 3-5 years time, when the new consoles start to arrive.
There are some vids showing this tech at gametrailers btw:
I dunno…quite some time ago I made a post proposing something very much like this (not sure if it was this forum though), but I wasn’t being at all serious. Even at a casual glance I see too many problems, then and now:
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You need a working internet connection (shock horror, this isn’t 100% reliable for most people and does go out occasionally, not to mention the speed problem).
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The service actually needs to be accessible (I don’t care how cloudy it is, it can still fail–once in a while even Google isn’t accessible to me even though other sites still work).
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You have to hope that the game you want to play is actually still available–it’s a sure bet that at least some of your favorite games will eventually disappear for various reasons (censorship etc.).
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The need for hardware doesn’t magically disappear; you’re just transferring it from you to someone else, with the added burden of transmission + compression. I’m not sure how this actually improves things…you still have to pay for it, and probably subscription prices will end up costing you more in the long run vs. just buying your own hardware up front. Plus you have latency, and compression artifacts–zero latency and no compression is inherently superior every time.
The only good thing is the elimination of piracy, but it comes at the expense of giving up too much control. Despite that it still sounds like it has a place, but it’s unlikely to be the total upset that they’re claiming; if successful it’ll just be another option. And for that I encourage it, even if I personally am not interested–more options are always good.
–Eric
gaming (like everybody else) is entering cloud computing era, that’s clear, at GDC '09 everybody is talking about that… Unity has great advantage of (great) web player, but that’s not the end of the road… It’s a field to explore extensively if you want to be alive in 5 years…
my 0.2 $
edit: there’s video (Video: OnLive gaming demonstrated live, network latency discussed) of Steve Perlman presenting onlive service
This has been tried before and they aren’t the only one aiming at it again. I think it offers both pros and cons, if it’s good depends on how several aspects are realised in real.
Up to now the speed and bandwidth always was an issue and i expect it to be that for another time to come. Probably useable for a smaller gaming community here and there but simply not for the masses at this point to define the standard for game distribution.
Second issue is the performance and the physical location of the clouds. If this is meant to work in a global way for the masses you first will have to do huge investments into a reliable infrastructure. If all goes well i would expect to pop up cloud after cloud and at some point it might be working in a satisfying way.
Third issue which they might have fixed this time is the content aspect. Get the games people really want to play onto this service. Looks better this time than with the tries before. Obviously another aspect is how the shop is done, how can developers offer their games, what are the conditions for both the developers and the gamers, is it fair for all sides, who has the control and so on.
Generally i like the idea beacuse it gives you a wonderful defined and reliable platform even on a pixel perfect basis were you don’t have to care about any of the usual hickups like gfx capabilities, performance of the GPU/CPU and so on. It just needs insane number crunching power, fast and fat connections, once this is running it could be great.
I like the inspector and audience aspect of it a lot and it also could take professional gaming to a complete new level because it could be consumed by masses via TV.
Cloud networks popping up offering their number crunching services to channel like distributors like TV channels, some of them are also sold to on independet games focusing channels and so on. You could come up with this and quite some other perspectives and alternatives.
It would enable gaming on so many more devices, could actually kill the consoles in it’S current form, reduce the development costs (support only one defined platform/configuration), enlarge the gamer base. In the long term it also would affect Unity because if this would be common practice for playing and delivering games, you don’t need fallbacks, webplayers and such things anymore. Of course this is a scary scenario for hardware vendors like nVIDIA, Intel and such because although you still need to buy hardware the numbers would decrease because you need less due to a much better utalisation. The hardware is there were it’s needed and not sleeping at someones place at home.
Anyway great concept but the infrastructure isn’t up to it right now. Actually this doesn’t only apply to games, same discussion in the serious sectors where you’re dealing with clients and video/flash/3d realtime rendering/compositing on server or client basis is discussed. Maybe you wouldn’t belief what things have been tried there already. :O)
OnLive doesn’t compete with Unity. OnLive is a platform, and Unity is middleware. Unity doesn’t compete with it any more than it competes with the XBox.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if UT added OnLive build support for those who get an OnLive SDK. It’s largely just running an executable on their servers and piping the video/sound/input back and forth, after all. (It’d probably be a special license akin to the iPhone/Wii Unity licenses)
I believe its just another PR article to get the word out there and get attention of potential investors.
Probably it will soon be forgotten as hundred other startups.
I don’t think it will be forgotten, I do think it will have a great success.
But the overhype side of this announcement is a bit … dirty.
Especially, OnLive does not allow realtime multiplayer services to work usefully.
Quake on it would be fun ^^ You are dead before you see the enemy.
For single player games thought it has a lot of potential. But I highly doubt that it actually will work out as the monthly fee will be massive. After all they need high end machines to render current and next gen games.
True, but I hope for them that they took in consideration the empty purse of the average gamer …
Nice tech demo
I really don’t see 3d artists using a dodgy (and tiny) touch screen to do any kind of serious modelling.
I also don’t see hardware manufacturers (Intel, nVidia, ATI/AMD, etc) not putting up a huge fight if this technology takes off.
I definitely hope not.
The traditional digital distribution is already gray area legality wise in many countries and inacceptable price wise due to the removal of reselling. (steam europe asks for games as much if not more than the physical disks costs in stores, thats a totaly insane and bad, tastless joke, cause one of the major benefits of digital distribution was and is the cutdown of the whole distribution pipeline, costs for storage the stores and distributors need, shipping etc)
But not owning it at all and expecting that people buy stuff is totally unreasonable.
Keep in mind, onlive is not a “flat rate” renting service like Metaboli (which to me IS the future and I hightly recomend it to any gamer in switzerland, austria, germany, france and uk where its available at very least), its a “pay but never own and play at our sole discretion” service and for that its just 700% too expensive (sure they need the cash to pay the hardware but to me its about $80 for owning something I can resell to paying $xx + monthly fee to not even owning a digital license
Though I see it as benefit to life in europe for once cause here onlive will never or not reasonably soon happen. they are already near incapable to handle 3-5 ISPs with their unrealistic latency requirements, not to talk about 70-100 as they would already have to for western europe
So… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbt799xIRJk
Now the thing is already here and it WILL be a ******* big problem to all indie devs; especially those who make only single-player games for mobile.
If it runs smoothly enough without any lag in average internet speed and is cheap enough too, it can destroy any indie company used to earn from mobiles and I think it won’t take long to happen.
If it turns out as a boom, indies are in trouble!
Omg, Arkham City on a phone?! Really? 
It is certainly the future, but for now there are some serious lag issues for some users (I tested it with FEAR 2, and couldn’t play more than 5 minutes because of 300 ms lag input).
Plus, some games which can’t be enjoyed with lag won’t be as appealing with OnLive Mobile than their real app counterpart. And I guess their real price will be an advantage, too, compared to OnLive subscription service.
Anyway it’s good to see them grow stronger and stronger. Quick gaming session on a game you didn’t own is very appealing for casual gamers. I wish them success.
I believe it when I see it. It seems like many of the big players are taking this seriously though. In the other article (Game industry executives react to OnLive video games on demand announcement | VentureBeat) Steve Perlman is responding to sceptics about latency with fast paced action games and price of servers. I’m not sure I understand what he is saying. Do you think they can actually make this work with FPS games in large scale, globally?
I’ve been playing it a fair bit recently (Just Cause 2 and Metro 2033).
It’s really, really good.
Not as good as a boxed game; it’s obvious that you’re playing the visual equivalent of a top-graphics game via an (extremely well and clearly) compressed video. But the latency is pretty much unnoticeable and it runs full-screen on my crappy laptop which wouldn’t have a hope in hell of playing those games natively.
It won’t be ruling out PCs/consoles as the best option to play games on, but it’s very cool.