and what about the lag?
because bandwidth isn't all you know

It looks really impressive and I always imagined a system like this one day but a presentation on a stage will probably vary from someone at home. I'll be skeptical about this until I hear some reviews

In before the lawsuit that the Phantom Gaming System was created for.

the PS3 has problems streaming from a disc to the system (i.e mandatory installs) how the hell is this going to stream consistently over a broadband connection. I see Epic Fail in it's future.

@Takeshi

Nuh-uh! I brought it up 13 posts in!

"Don't get me wrong, it'd be wonderful if this actually worked, but so far all I'm seeing right now is the Phantom, mark 2."

Yeah, I'm not sure about this.....

I like the idea, just been discussing "broadband usage limits" ie, gigs per day....

I think i would personally max out an average daily usage limit if i got one of these in no time.

I'll be interested when they make an iPhone app that plays PS3 games over 3G. And uses the iPhone's bluetooth to connect the controller. :)

I still think that lack of ownership of the games is a problem, I know that when I purchase a game I want to be able to have the ability to play it @ any given time w/o paying any $- hell, that is why I still own my nes, 2600, n64, dreamcast, genesis, etc- so that when I want to I can actually plug them in and play them. The thing is that once you have played a game on this service, you only take away the time you spent on it.

I still have yet to see anyone address my biggest concern, so here goes nothing;
What if this company goes belly up? You will be left with thousands of dollars worth of games that you will no longer be able to play. There's no way Onlive's going to stay up and running until the day I die, so aren't I essentially renting these games for an extended period of time? I think this concept is going to be a whole lot better in theory than in execution.

everything looks good except for the broadband limits, that seems troublesome.

Totally uninterested, and those of you who are claiming that this it "the future" are 110% tools.

Those people with bandwidth caps on their Internet connections are going to be left totally in the lurch with this, unlike those who have a disc in hand.

No Internet connection (for any reason) means no gaming, unlike those who have a disc in hand.

Internet slowdowns (for any reason) mean no gaming, unlike those who have a disc in hand.

Even a single-player game will require an Internet connection, unlike those who have a disc in hand.

If the company goes belly up, you "lose" all of those games, unlike those who have a disc in hand.

This will probably have its niche, if it ever comes to fruition, but I'm quite certain that I and millions of other gamers will not even give it a consideration. And I'll bet that the horsepower required for such a service will be so significant that it cannot sustain a feasible economic model without costing an arm and a leg to the customer.

I'm loving how this is pissing off so many PC gamers who want it to fail.

This could be awesome.

When people mention this is like the phantom, it isnt really. That was about downloading games to the harddrive, it wasn't On Demand like this. Plus that was vaporware and was never shown in any phsyical shots, just mock ups.

@njsykora:

Go back to troll school. The arguments against this service can be applied to every console out there, not just the PC.

And the fact that you think that it's based on people who "want it to fail" proves that you are totally clueless about how the Internet works, the infrastructure that powers it, and the profit-centers (ISPs) that control it.

If you look carefully at the guy's hand while he's playing crysis - there's about a .75 second lag on everything he's doing, easiest to see when he's looking around quickly. The truth will come out when we play this system, and I can almost guarantee it will be crazy laggy. Great for RTSs or RPGs, but not so much FPSs or action games.

This would be great except that it will only work in places with fantastic boradband speeds.

And you thought that wireless-controller lag was noticable/bad.

@Pyroph

If you live someplace where MPEG-2 HDTV cable broadcasts are hitting your house, you most likely can support this (again, assuming 1.5Megabyte/sec download is sufficient).

No need to do this "across the world" as there would most likely be regional hubs to prevent such a thing.

The graphics settings will probably be locked to keep users from eating up more processor time than OnLive plans for. This would keep the service consistent from a processing perspective. The "no piracy" advertisement scares me though. Think of what would happen if this became the sole service with which to play games. This would allow the publishers to keep the consumer from being able to fix the price. Even though piracy hurts the industry, it also serves as a form of checks and balances. Is the game garbage or overpriced -- Download It!.

In the past, the industry was able to justify game prices because of "publishing costs" (discs, manuals, cases, distribution, etc.). With the rise of digital distribution, we've seen very little reduction in prices for the consumer. Why should we have to pay roughly the same price for a game that we have no physical media for when the publisher makes a much higher profit percentage because of the absence of "publishing" overhead. Sure, they've gotta worry about bandwidth costs, but the internet is cheap.

If this service takes off, it's unlikely that it will make games cheaper. If it becomes the majority of the market, then OnLive has the power to pull a Microsoft and start charging ungodly rates for using the service. This cost will trickle to the consumer -- and since everything is server-side, there's no checks and balances for the system.

I think it's a great idea, bringing all games to all TV/PC/Mac in the world. It just scares the shit out of me because the games industry is huge, and the suits are just itching for a way to monopolize the market and rape the consumer. We'll see...

I have a positive outlook for them. I think this will appeal to a lot of people. They sure have my attention.

@John B

I'm very familiar with response time and lag. I develop Video on Demand Applications that you most likely have used (if you have Cable/Fios/VirginMedia/etc).

The same hurdles delivering video exist in delivering game content. I've also contributed code to our own Games on Demand service that Verizon has.

"All you need is one little bit of slowdown in the pipe and the entire game experience could be ruined."

How is this any different than playing a game of COD4 on XBL? You are constantly lagging (even though it's not readily apparent) as no one has 0 ping (except maybe the host). There are techniques that can be employed to mitigate these issues.


@GuitarAtomik

That's very interesting as 5Mbps is hardly any more than a 352x480 SD MPEG-2 OnDemand video stream (3.75Mbps). That's not even considered "HD" in the realm of OnDemand video. This would imply that the video quality of the game would be quite "undesirable" on anything but a 640x480 SDTV

ACCESSIBLE PC GAMING! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU I DONT WANT KIDS IN MAH PCS

It's entirely different than playing COD4 on XBL or any other game, because you don't have a local client in this instance, all of your input needs to go to the server and then be sent back down as video feedback. When you play a multiplayer game online the game allows you to input controls directly on your client, gets you immediate feedback, and then the server works out whatever did the best it can. How exactly that works depends on the netcode for that specific game, but anything done decently will still work out playable with around 100ms or so latency.

Now can you imagine the clusterfuck this would cause if you are playing a MULTIPLAYER game on this service? You would need to send your input to the onlive server which then needs to send that input the server of the game you are playing which then needs to send game information back to the onlive server which then needs to send this back to you in video format. I just don't see that working at all. Did they even say if it supports multiplayer for games? I hear that stuff is popular.

I think this technology would be more interesting if applied to MMOs where you could have the game server and the rendering center in the same place. Additionally it would fit much better with MMOs already using a subscription model for their playing, so "owning" the game is never really an issue anyways.

I'm always online anyway, and when I'm not, I'm fixing my connection, not playing a game. I would rather have my games stored server-side than lose them or accidentally break them, both of which I am prone to do. There might be hiccups initially, but there are MANY homes with always-on connections already, and that will expand by leaps and bounds within the next five years. I honestly can't see this taking more than six months post-release to catch on, and I can virtually guarantee you it'll be in every game-playing home a year after that.

If it works as advertised.

Oh, and to the guy who mentioned that you could see the guy's hand lagging: no, no you couldn't. Unless you have a video feed that's better than mine, there is no way you could have actually seen that and been certain about it. His hand was a pink dot on a black dot, and his movements were barely visible at that resolution.

Take off the trenchcoat and put down the magnifying glass. You are not Columbo.

hum.. unless you have a ping lesser than 60, witch is fucking rare, you will have upwards of 120 ms of lag between input and reaction, since the signal have to go, the server have to encode the video, and the reaction have to go back to you. if you look at the video, the guy in the big screen misses the aim from one side to another, because he keeps needing to compensate for the delay. And they are on giga-awesome settings, temperature, pressure and planet alignment. Maybe for rts games it could work. Hell, even some wireless mouses that have a minimal lag are annoying to use for gaming, imagine that.

But hey, if they do some magical stuff and it works nicely, great. I'd love for that to be possible.

@ Emrah
Unless they can go faster than light, latency always will be a problem