We're dealing with companies like Sony trying to charge just for cloud save features. Cloud gaming probably isn't going to happen unless they can find a way to really profit from it. And with hard drive limitations and the such, I would think digital distribution makes more sense than cloud gaming.

Snarf

Count me out. This has no benefit for anyone except the people trying to make money off of it.

cloud gaming should be the way to rent games. id understand microsoft or third parties not wanting to stream triple-A titles, but i'd gladly pay 5 - 10 bucks extra a month for a live membership that would allow me to have access to all of the xbla games via a streaming service.

the only way id be down for cloud gaming is if it were presented as a way to "rent" games, but not as the only way to play any of my games - especially games i buy.

"We're dealing with companies like Sony trying to charge just for cloud save features."

Most dishonest comment of the day award.

On topic, everyone has their own pet theory about where gaming is headed in the future. This is just one of many many possibilities, and if it happens, I'm sure we as gamers will roll with it just like we always have.

I've said it before, I'll say it again... OnLive's bandwidth and server usage have gotta come from somewhere.

When someone's playing Crysis 2 or whatever, there's a server somewhere devoting a chunk of its resources rendering the game and delivering it to you. So OnLive has to pay for the energy consumption every time you play a game, because they're the ones paying part of the electricity bill, not you. On a game you can theoretically play forever, the energy costs for you playing the game are eventually going to nibble away any profits OnLive made from the sale of the game to you. A successful multiplayer title with longevity like Modern Warfare 2 or whatever would kill OnLive. The only games which can succeed as a streaming service are MMORPGS with a monthly fee, provided OnLive can get a slice.

The big thing with OnLive is bandwidth, however. Most Canadian ISPs limit the bandwidth to 100 Gigs a month or less. With OnLive's 3 gig an hour bandwidth usage, that's 33 hours of gaming time for meteorscrap... Provided he doesn't use his internet for streaming videos from his Xbox or online or do anything with the internet whatsoever. Even in the USA, most "unlimited" providers have a clause about excessive usage. Until the bandwidth issue is addressed either by ISPs raising their limits or OnLive somehow fighting that 3 gig an hour bandwidth use down to a more reasonable level, I'm not convinced it's going to take off very well.

And to complete this trifecta of insanity, let's not forget that you have to have enough computing power to handle cloud-based gaming, which means that either a majorly anticipated launch title is going to necessitate more servers or you're going to log on to your cloud and find out that "Oops, Servers are full! Try again another time!" Either way, it's an additional expense that companies don't need, especially when one considers the way the market could fluctuate. Imagine having to keep an extra fifty or sixty server banks online because your traffic jumps up every game release, and for eighty percent of the time those servers are pretty much dormant. That'd be a piss-off to any business owner.

It's exciting technology people are jumping on because it's new, but eventually it's going to become the victim of its own success. It's not sustainable, because the business is taking on more expenses rather than passing them on to the consumer. OnLive will either fold, or remain niche. They can't afford a breakout success.

Release a 'cloud gaming' console in Australia (or most other countries) and it's guaranteed to fail. Internet speed and quota (yes, a lot of places still have monthly quotas) are not fast enough or large enough to support the 'next generation' gaming.

I can't believe that Australia's internet is worse than Brazil. It can't be!

Scared: A lot of US internet companies are introducing them.

Because Memory Cards/USBs are hard

The world's infrastructure simply can't handle digital as the sole platform. Unless you live in a big area you're probably hit with caps and speed limits that makes the recommended 5megs for onlive ridiculous. We're another 10 years off at least for this.

Cloud proponents might be better if they weren't so up their own asses. Cloud gaming is a good idea in theory yes, but American ISPs aren't providing remotely the bandwidth required for native 1080p gaming. I would rather not have to suffer through another generation of sub-HD consoles and another half-decade of games stuck in the past just to push a fledgling tech.

Just like people were slow to take to Steam, people will be slow to take to cloud gaming. personally I like it in theory, but since I don't live in a big city, the internet sucks, call me in 10 years when the internet companies give a damn about places with less than 1 million people living within 5 feet of each other.

im all for cloud gaming over traditional digital distribution because I hate waiting for a game to download and the I am stingy on harddrive space

but I really dont think cloud gaming could come next gen or maybe in two gens because really right now connections would be too slow and cause lag plus the amount of bandwidth it would use up.

Someone who lives in the UK or the parts of the USA where the internet is absolute shite should take Mr. Perry into their house to demonstrate the reason why cloud gaming doesn't work yet, and won't until the infrastructures of the major consumers are improved.

Fuck cloud gaming, now and forever. You take that control away from me, and I take that money away from you.

"Perry also mentioned that gaming has to "fundamentally" get back to being accessible, something he feels the cloud can help address."

what a tool, gaming is more accessible today then ever before, and yes, there is such a thing as "too accessible". there is a point at which that accessibility begins to eat away at functionality and efficiency and IMO at least at the present time cloud gaming is definitely overstepping that mark.

@ Meteor and Scuffles

While I agree with a good part of what you're saying, I don't agree with the outlook that somehow OnLive is going to have issues bringing in profits.

Server farms, or at least this what college is teaching us, are more cost efficient the larger they are. So if OnLive takes off, their costs could theoretically go way down as people use the service and they have to expand their existing server farm size more and more.

And then there's the fact that Steam does very well for itself in spite of their having to run servers as well. Obviously much less so than OnLive, but it would still be considerable and they're still doing quite well so I have no reason to believe that those who play CoD a ton are going to hurt them if they're also buying the DLC that comes out. If they leverage their service correctly, they'll be sucking money out of people like Steam does with sales and promotions on providing demos or rents for games that people might not otherwise play and turn those trials into sales.

There's all sorts of room for the service to take off and it could really hurt consoles if they don't adapt right now. If they don't tackle it (in spite of it's many current limitations) they'll be crying in the not too distant future as consoles get phased out as relics while Steam and OnLive do their thing and the PC (and PC devices) become the defacto way to game again.

What's an interesting prospect to me is the idea of Steam branching out into this model and supporting both a full DD and streaming service.

I was pleasantly surprised by onlive.

Just wish my fair to middling internet connection could handle it better.

In 10 years when the infrastructure can take it, I'm sure it'll be awesome.

@Drakengard

Here's the thing. Let's say that the $49.99 price point leaves OnLive with twelve bucks for their own pockets after the publisher has been given their cut. That twelve bucks has to cover the operating costs for the game itself, the staff maintaining the servers, and whatever the cost is for piping out 3 gigs of bandwidth to the end user. Let's say that cost is five cents an hour. Yes, that's two-hundred and forty hours for a game before it becomes unprofitable, but consider a lot of games which have strong online communities.

I have no doubts that the majority of the userbase still playing Modern Warfare 2 right now, nearly two full years after launch, have all put in over 240 hours. That's 100,000 people. Getting back to those theoretical numbers I mentioned, those 100,000 people playing the game translate into a $5000 per hour operating cost. I've seen the numbers: At peak hours, Modern Warfare can still maintain a number of users that high for six hours a night.

That's a cost of over thirty grand a night.

OnLive, until this point, has been very careful not to pick up games with a lot of mass multiplayer appeal, and I think this is why. A breakout success would kill them or their credibility. Imagine if they shut off a game 100,000 people were still playing nightly. A game people paid good money to buy access to not only it, but DLC as well. I'd be furious if a game with such an active community got shut down for no apparent reason. I certainly wouldn't be taking my business to OnLive again.

A successful game like Modern Warfare 2 on OnLive would present them with a catch-22: Keep the game long past the point of profitability to keep customers happy, or shut it down once it moves beyond that point and face the wrath of the customer?

So this guy is the CEO of a cloud gaming company, and he's assuring us that cloud gaming is going to be the next big thing. Yawn. It's called a sales pitch.

What ever happened to pop it in and play? This generation pretty much single-handedly killed videogames for me.

It's a cool idea, and I would expect MS to try something cloud related maybe a year into the release of their next hardware cycle. It would be great for providing timed demos of retail releases that are streamed directly over XBL. I know there are several games I'm interested in, but I don't want to take the plunge until the price drops, or I can get to play the first hour of the game.

Well with the way user agreements are going we aren't really going to own the hardware anymore either....

@ Kanten

It's only compounded by the lack of competition. I'm locked into a local ISP. They're actually pretty great, but the fact remains that I can't even get Comcast here.

If there was real competition (and legal changes) I think we'd see a vastly different marketplace. But perhaps I'm just dreaming... Oh well.