Crytek researched videogame streaming for two years before coming to the same conclusion that I did after a few seconds of watching OnLive: We aren’t ready for a videogame streaming service until broadband gets faster and more reliable.
"We had our research in 2005 on this subject but we stopped around 2007 because we had doubts about economics of scale,” Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli told GamesIndustry.biz. “But that was at a time when bandwidth was more expensive."
“We saw that by 2013 - 2015 with the development of bandwidths and household connections worldwide that it might become more viable then,” he added. Cevat explained the Crytek didn't want to wait around for us to get bet connections and broadband infrastructure, so they dropped the idea.
OnLive will be doing what Crytek thought wasn't possible for a few more years, and he's being a good cheerleader about it. He said that he hopes it works and thinks the service "could improve gamer's lives." If sitting on the couch all day, constantly navigating between hundreds of games is improvement, that is.
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Contest:
7:30 PM on 04.02.2009
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As they did say, they were trying it back when bandwidth was more expensive.
Then again, bandwidth still IS expensive. I can barely get my upstream optimized on my cable modem, how am I supposed to expect Burnout Paradise to run properly over my connection? I'd get throttled down in seconds.
OnLive's people admitted to there being up to an 80ms delay on some games, even from a datacenter just 50 miles away. What can we expect from a datacenter 1000 miles away (which was their target range)?
Even if broadband was cheap, and we all epically fast connections, time adds up. Controller to PC, PC to OnLive, Onlive to process, Onlive to PC.
Anyway, my original point was that it hardly seems like news to say that there's more people who see the same problems.
Thats that.
Now explain to me how they plan to pay for all of this only charging their stated "similar to Xbox Live" pricing. Then factor in the hardware upgrades they'll have to spend money on so you don't.
Thinking optimistically you need 10 paying OnLive customers for every 1 person actually using the service.
This also all comes from a guy that says it will take 2-3 to a week to port/emulate it on their hardware........
The money just doesn't add up. It's a high-end gaming time-share and no one can see it.
I work for the industry leader in the TV video On Demand space as a systems architect and engineer and presently when anyone on digital cable or FIOS is purchasing an on demand video you are already streaming 3.75Mbps to 18Mbps to the house (*gasp*). Not only that, but the back office hardware & software that is controlling the streaming and input data is turning around tens of thousands of input requests per second in under 50ms in a steady state.
Make no mistake, the network infrastructure exists for this to succeed. This service is going to live or die based on:
1. The quality of the engineers producing the back office software to push the data packets around.
2. The willingness of the Comcasts and Verizons of the U.S. to allow the data.