Cloud based gaming to render consoles obsolete

"Over the Internet "instantaneously", with no lag"

I think the bigger news is that "OnLive" has broken the speed of light for large quantities of data

Kudos OnLive

Personally, I think it's a great idea.

It's not like Steam though, it runs it from a data server, so don't expect to play offline.

So you could, in theory, remotely play a game that is being hosted on supercomputer level power? sweet!! No more need for gaming PCs!!

Someone sunk a whole lot of venture capital into this operation, so of course the promoters are saying it's going to d othe impossible. Howeve4r, where's Blizzard, *the* number one online gaming company by orders of magnitude? Not in the list.

Epic fail.

The phrases "Over the internet" and "instantaneously with no lag" when used together, make a good oxymoron. What are the system requirements? A 400 Mbps connection?

Take a look at their GDC video presentation where they explain the technology and demo it. They explain the bandwidth necessary is under 1.5Mbps downstream for SDTV level and 5Mbps downstream for HDTV. They also explain that there is no human perceptible lag within 1000 miles of their datacenters and most of that is due to the 'last mile' lag of about 25 miliseconds (below human perception).

OK they are going to deliver streaming video to the customer of a game they control via a thin client in real-time over the internet??
OK currently the memory bandwidth and latency of graphics hardware has an impact on responsiveness of gameplay, I am sure sending command data over the internet to a hugely powerful server that renders the action then streams video back to said thin client is going to work "REALLY WELL", dream on.

The logistics of this are like a bad physics joke. It might be possible if you had a DSLAM cabinet in your back yard. Think about it; whatever ping you have will be at least tripled. First, the video image of whatever game you're playing has to be sent to you. Then, your input (moving, shooting) has to be sent back. Lastly, the server has to send back the updated image. If you normally have 30ms ping to your game server, you now have 90+. This might be OK for MMORPG's, but that's about it.

It is not a joke because it already exists. They have already created the whole thing and solved the major technical issues you mentioned and have it deployed to 3 datacenters. They claim in their GDC presentation to be in closed beta and have tested the system in over a hundred different residential connections and are going to an open beta over the summer for a general North American release in the winter.

Pay attention people. You have to look beyond the "Over the internet" and "no lag" comments. This is another step in the direction of giving them more CONTROL over what us consumers would like to do. The keys in this scenario is No Offline Mode and a Monthly Fee. I doubt the fee will include the actual cost of games. You buy the game then have to pay a monthly fee yet you can't do $hit without the rest of their service. Bull$hit!! I pay for a game it is MY CHOICE to be able to play it anytime anywhere without their service. We've done fine for years if not decades without this kind of lock-down on the servers by providing our own personal servers or paying for a server. Paying for a server is different because you have a choice...you don't have to and you can still enjoy the game without one. Don't support this...it's just another step in the direction of CONTROL!!

If you read carefully that 1.5 is for 480p that is wii quality, and from what I read their 720p requiring 5.0mbs connect doesn't look as polished as 720p on similar console game. Lets see I want to play WOW on my 1680X1050 monitor scaling band with I would need about a 15mbs connect now my wife and I play together all the time so we would a 30mbs connection lets see. One I can't get that in a single line 2 for double lines to get that I'll be paying $200 a month. This is just my wife and I. What would happen to a family with 2 teenage kids. Hey lets play Mario cart over our 60mbs connect. Sorry honey you'll movie download will have to wait. They don't even talk about sound I personally like 5.1 while playing.

mbs = millibarn times second
mbps = millibarn times picosecond
Mbit/s = megabit divided by (per) second
WTF = watt times telsa times farad

No wonder that cloud computing becomes so popular, with so many experts online.

This is the actual abbreviation used by the industry from provider to your router. Similar to MPG for miles per gallon the industry chose not to follow standard scientific notation. Else a car sticker or the fuel economy government website would read 40mi/gal instead of 40MPG.
My next rant against the cloud computing gaming idea is what are they going to do when I want to add a mod to the game or play around with the game files to optimize the game to how I like it? Oblivion comes to mind. I just don't see them giving that kind of freedom to users and rightly so.

Also to add to what others said about latency unless they have laid their own fiber lines everywhere and do not use copper in their relays you still have latency. If it takes me 8ms to ping local service provider and 45ms more to simply ping Settle, the closest major city then how can they possibly get latencies of 20ms to my house and I just don't see them putting servers in every town of 20,000.
Finally at the same GDC it was reported that 1 in 4 computers are used for gaming. Add in the number of counsels played today and every gamer using 5Mbps to play at 720p. That's a large new load placed on the web's infrastructure already being strained.
I doubt they will get a significant market share much less dominate the industry.

In a "traditional" system, you have (at 60 fps) 16.7 ms delay between your action and seeing the result on the screen. If you're going remote, you've got 30 ms for the data on the way out, 16.7 ms to render (and also compress) as before, 30 ms on the way back in again, 16.7 ms to actually recieve all the frame data, and finally another 16.7 ms to actually get it on the screen. So a total of 110 ms best case, give or take a bit for the assumed 30 ms network latency.

Visual feedback latency becomes an issue at about 50 ms (not the 80 ms they use from their cherry-picked study), so they're stuffed for high-speed games (FPS, racing, etc) before they even get started. It'd be fine for games that don't need fast/accurate responses though.

This matches up relatively well with what OnLive themselves are claiming - 80 ms round trip on the network (presumably best case, since this is from advertising material), so with the additional 16.7 ms screen latency this comes to 96.7 ms, not too far off the 110 ms estimate above and well above the perception threshold of 50 ms.

Plus, if they're putting a 720p60 video down a 5 mbit connection, compressed probably no better than MPEG2 quality (given that it's gotta be real-time compressed), it's not going to look too hot in fast-action scenes. Even worse if you're running 480p over 1.5 mbit.

Imagine trying to pull off a headshot on strafing target, at 640x480, where the figure is messed up by compression artefacts, and you have a 80 ms ping.

Overall, the community etc aspects look potentially fun, for a lot of casual games (and things like MMORPGs) the latency won't be an issue, and the success of the Wii has shown that low-res is acceptable for a console. But it won't even come close to the experience you'll get from running the game directly on mid-range PC or current-gen console.

This is nothing new...The sony ps3 and sony psp can already do this. i can play lair thats a ps3 game on psp and yea the faster your dsl speed the better. Lets hope they can make it work smooth :D..

A computer with a decent card has more than 100 processing units in it - 1 user : 100 processors.
Why on earth would you want to turn that on its head? No-one seems to point that out in the great rush to the 'cloud'...
Wanna buy a terminal anyone?

It is cheaper to receive equivalent capability via the cloud concept than it would be to buy your own hardware. You get both resource maximization and economy of scale so for the same price (for example) you could get the equivalent of 500 processing units for 1 user (or pay 1/5 the price to get the equivalent of the 100 processing units you mentioned).

...then wouldn't it be possible to stream a full OS desktop?

Then we'd just need hardware browsers.

I'm a distibuted computing net, which means I like to give my computing power to researchers who might not have access to supercomputers.

If I can give my computing power to gamers who don't want to pay out for expensive gaming hardware, than that makes my hobby slightly profitable. So, rather than my hobby being a 100% charitable drain, I can offset that by renting my stuff out to people in town.

If it's legal(or legalized) for me to rent out my power to people so that they can play online video games, then sign me up!!!111ONEONEONE

(I'll bookmark this page in case anybody has anything super-helpful to say :) )

...then wouldn't it be possible to stream a full OS desktop?"

Yes it's called Citrix XenDesktop.

Streaming a full OS desktop is trivial in comparison to what OnLive is doing and I believe that concept (general purpose, desktop replacement, computing on the cloud) is already being targeted by Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

I myself like to have a game (physically) so that i may play offline when and where i want. Also when that machine is 2 generations old i want to be able to show my grandchildren the games i have wasted my life (human hours) on. Instead of some bollocks online on someone else's server and while they (company) are alive i'm permitted to play otherwise its GAME OVER! Along with all my progress - now that has got to be a waste of life where you can't show anything for it, except you're gonna become ready to hit the grave soon.

I think not, you keep your sh*t to yourself. But the morons of this world can go ahead and support this rubbish. Like that zombie said the other day, he'd like all his games on his HDD like his music on his ipod..... Does he realise just how volatile the data on HDD can be and HDDs fail and even when they don't fail, the files can become corrupted from time to time?! ... NOPE.

At least with dvds once you get the data on there it won't change for the next 30 years at least. Unless you actually want to destroy it. This is how i like my things - solid and predictable, no nasty surprises.

By the way, i still don't believe in paypal, paying using mobile phones and any other nonsense they come up with, i'll leave these to the new-age retards to experiment with as they are already inputting all their personal information online thinking it's some technical, cool thing to do. One day, it'll bite 'em on the balls!

They are already taking cannabis and becoming mentally retarded and schizophrenic while they shoot each other, bunch of wasteman, produced for the wrong reasons.

Bye. Jon.

It is a great Idea, but It will never surpass gaming console or PC gaming.

I hate to pay more just to play more!

- BTW Jesus Christ loves you

My connection feels redundant when I hear about its connection speed requirement.
5 Mbit is shit. I had that kind of snail connection for over five years ago. Today we are talking about 100Mbit.
What he is saying about your actual speed is not correct at all.
When I had 8Mbit/s I could download things at the speed of ~900 KB/s.
Later on I upgraded to proper fibre connection so I fixed 30 Mbit and managed to reach ~3700 KB/s and today I got 100 Mbit and have reached speed considerably higher than 100 Mbit.

I'm quite sure we wont see this service go live at all.

IM ON WEBTV CAN I USE THIS OR WHAT

@ McKinley

HOW DO ISO? I DOWNLOAD GAME HOW I PLAY?!?! HOW IS SEED?!

I think Mr. Norman Andrews said it better, though.

You got that right Jon!! Only the *ZOMBIE* retards will follow. Retard followers, wake-up and put yourselves in their shoes...the key thing they want out of this is more control over you, your hobby and your dollars. They don't really care to make it better for you...it's for them in the long run. And on top of that what the hell are you going to do when your connection is down, when you hit your ISP's cap, or when and if you start getting taxed for all this internet activity $hit!! Yup, you'll look back and only admit to yourselves that you're a retard.

Can you imagine how quick you'd get kicked off Comcast if you actually used this?

Total vaporware.

What about network lag, packet loss and all that other stuff.
It wont be as smooth as they claim for sure.
Nice pipe dream but doubtful its going to happen like they claim.
Vaporware dream.

I already watch IPTV from my telephone company, it's the same quality video feed as these guys are talking about. All they are adding is the back communication of the control inputs. Their thesis: a video game is nothing but interactive TV; but it is basically TV. There's no way it could work on the cable TV system, there simply isn't enough bandwidth for all the subscribers on a given trunk, but via telephone it could work. It'll just be another channel on my IPTV (one I won't tune to, by the way). The reason I get 150 channels on telephone is because when I send the "change channel" command to the TV, it transmits that command to the phone company which then changes the feed going to my house. Therefore, unlimited channels.

"Control" is right. The video game belongs to the author & developer by the way, it's just by happy chance that in the current distribution model we get a copy of the object code that some of us are clever enough to decompile & break the copy protection & re-distribute as warez. So yeah, I am sure that developers are pretty tired of having their product vandalized and stolen 100% of the time, and this completely fixes that problem. But there is a number of corresponding consumer benefits; the servers will be managed much better, and probably far more fault tolerant; nobody in an online competition has an equipment advantage except perhaps the form of the controller itself; and we won't have derelict old game discs laying around the place! But then again, at age 40 I guess I've outgrown video gaming, so I don't really care!

With this type of service, you can be sure that everyone is playing with skill and not hacking the game when playing multiplayer. It would also assure that everyone on the server is playing with a similar general latency which also helps to assure gaming fairness. These are big positives that they don't seem to mention much as an added benefit.

I think this service has it's place and would be beneficial to people who would like to get rid of the Windows OS entirely especially when they provide a Linux compatible browser plugin for the service as it may expand the breadth of games a Linux user could have over the Windows compatibility add-ons that are available.

Unfortunately, there are few countries with a modern enough infrastructure to host this type of service on a large scale with high quality so I don't see it replacing as much as adding to the other options available for gamers. This is especially true since the service can't join players together from all over a large country (much less the world) because of the service's geographical limitations.

Frankly, I think this service is probably better suited for interactive porn than large scale gaming at this juncture. Oops, have I just given away a business idea...?

play for any length of time and we'll all be hitting our caps or throttles. And imagine trying to get a stable experience on BT broadband.

This is not a good idea.

Knowing my luck, it will be the future of gaming ;)

I have to agree with the other fellas here when they say that this is nothing but control and a way to nickel and dime us more. I happen to like building and tweaking my machine to run games ( even with my shoestring budget ) and I like my consoles running the games locally. Whats more- I like being able to pull my oldies but goldies out of the shoebox and play them ten years later. The last thing I want is some dumb terminal streaming "pay to play" content to me. Ever see what happend when MMORPGs go offline because of age? I don't play them but it's still not pretty. I am SO tired of people trying to get more money out of us every month. Relying on an entity which may or may not be around in a few years to stream me this stuff "for a nominal monthly fee" makes me cringe... Even a one time fee for something like that seems like a bad idea.