Bigdownload has posted a few quotes from Stardock CEO Brad Wardell, where he chimes in on the newly announced (and totally unproven) 'streaming' game service, OnLive.
Quote:
When asked his opinion on if the OnLive service would work as advertised, Wardell told us, "I think it can do what it can do under ideal circumstances. But most people on the Internet don't have remotely ideal network connections. An occasionally lost packet and your gaming experience becomes unbearable." Finally when asked if OnLive could be a serious competitor to Stardock's Impulse service, Wardell said, "I don't see OnLive as a competitor at all. I think it serves a totally different market segment."
It will eventually work. I'm pretty certain of that.
But not now, not as a replacement service.
I think OnLive's best bet right now, is a complementary business that's more like a rental service or a demo service. That way, the occasional drop isn't a huge problem, because the customer is essentially just trying out a particular game without a time/disk/install/DRM commitment.
It's reasonable to be wary of a service like OnLive, much in the way we are wary of playing games like street fighter on xbox live. All it takes is one straw to break the camel's back.
However, OnLive is making its debut right on time for a new upward curve in internet bandwidth. Every day articles are coming out about incredible advancements in IT. It won't be long before the current top-tier connection speeds will seem embarrassingly slow. Remember your 33.6 modem? That wasn't very long ago.
My only concern with OnLive is mods. Mods are half the reason I get into PC FPS, and I don't see how they could be implemented. It's unreasonable to think that this issue hasn't come up yet in the OnLive offices, so I'm sure some sort of solution is on the horizon.
*Begins to read, remembers Stardock was the title, stops caring.*
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacDuff
Remember your 33.6 modem? That wasn't very long ago.
True, but at least in the USA its a matter of our entire communications infrastructure being shit, not just faster hardware coming out and making things better.
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I am coming a bit late to the whole OnLive business, but it sound like the folks against Steam are going to be even more annoyed with this: with OnLive you really don't own the game you are buying! This almost certainly has to have a different pricing model. I wouldn't feel comfortable paying more than $25 per game this way.
But this may have been discussed already in another thread...
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No matter how much bandwidth you have available there are limits placed on how fast you can move data by the laws of physics.
And we everything being done on remote servers except displaying the pretty pictures that's a recipe for lag.
Maybe if they could get the ISPs on board and get them to install the servers on their networks, as close to the end-users as possible, that might possibly work.
But that means the logistical and financial problems of getting the ISPs to join in.
Of then there is the bandwidth issue:
Assuming 3Mb/s on average for an HD game, after 8 hours of play you'll likely have d/led far more data than it would have taken to d/l the game from GameTap or Metaboli.
Doesn't make much sense especially if the US is likely to me moving towards useage based charging for net access.
personally i like owning and upgrading my computer. i'm not really on board with live because i think it takes some of the fun of gaming out of the equation.
I watched the OnLive "press conference" at the GDC and thought "sweet concept, neat hardware, and no way are most people going to be able to stream this."
Dude (Ron Perlman, I believe -- the other guy I just referred to as "Mark Cuban," owing to an uncanny resemblence) said to stream HD games, you would need a stable 15mb/s connection. Hmmm, that's 10 times my speed on a good day, and I can't help but think that there's tons of XBL/Home users who are in the same boat. Games in standard definition could be streamed at the 1.5mb/s (my speed) rate, though I'm guessing even a little instability there would kill my buzz and lag me out or make my screen jump around while people laughed and killed my character.
What was kind of disheartening, aside from the somewhat high-end minimum requirements, was the fact that he's saying that you'll need to allow for a minimum of 80ms latency for every action you take, which according to Ron is "below the threshold of human perception." I think someone really smart should write a simulator for this experience, so you can actually feel what the interface will be like -- I have no doubt that latency of 100+ milliseconds, experienced over and over again WILL be evident to anyone that's playing a game.
I mean, persistence of vision is one thing -- I've got no problem with people photographing things at 24 times per second and then calling it a "movie." That's fine, but playing a video game where your character (Street Fighter IV characters are often cited in this example) is really just an extension of how quickly and accurately your fingers move a stick and buttons is dependent on how closely the console interprets your actions and applies them to your character. This 80 millisecond thing, man, it will not stand.
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Dude (Ron Perlman, I believe -- the other guy I just referred to as "Mark Cuban," owing to an uncanny resemblence) said to stream HD games, you would need a stable 15mb/s connection.
And what they consider HD is 720p. I play almost all of my 360 games and some of my PS3 games in a higher resolution than that.
So... the system sorta works on a high speed connection and only offers HD gaming on an impossible speed connection.
Why are they announcing this again?
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I've been thinking about the Onlive quite a bit yesterday, and I think I realized it's biggest problem... game hardware is cheaper than it's ever been.
Most major games out there can be played on a $200 Xbox 360 Arcade. Nobody is really developing games for top of the line $2000+ machines. Most the big PC developers (iD, Epic, Cry Tek) have moved onto PC/console development.
Now if there were a bunch of games out there that looked 10x better than what you could get on consoles, (like during the late 90s with Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Ultima IX) I could see this service working, but the problem is there aren't any game out there that can't be played on a cheap PC or console.
Yea, regardless of how cool what they've developed is, and it does look cool, they're still hamstrung by the internet connection. I'm not convinced that it'll work, I've experienced enough lag and understand networking enough in games to seriously doubt the viability in the real world. I mean, even in the games we have now, when we experience lag (and games are pushing nowhere near the bandwidth that this needs) it's lag on what the server reports to us, which is not necessarily what we see and perceive. In WoW, for instance, you don't wait for the server to show you your own movements, which is how most games work, so lag is masked nearly completely for most games. There's a big difference between lag for server validations and lag for showing the player anything. The greater change the user actions create visually, the bigger the problem.
In terms of lag with regards to some games wouldn't be that much different, though. Take something like a 2D fighting game, camera isn't controlled by the player, and this type of system (bandwidth excluded from consideration) wouldn't incur any extra lag regarding what the player sees for 'validated' actions.
I could definitely see this as a big deal in the future, obviously game publishers (those not funded by console makers) would love it. I'm just not sure the future is now, for the majority of gamers and games.
I got a 100% stable 30/30mbit connection but no way am I going to have that kind of speed from my house and to the content server. That is, unless they actually build a serverpark at my ISP...
I got a 100% stable 30/30mbit connection but no way am I going to have that kind of speed from my house and to the content server. That is, unless they actually build a serverpark at my ISP...
Which they won't, for a couple of reasons. If you're in Scandinavia, they won't market to you or anyone outside of the US, as all their servers will be here and your latency would of course be huge. They've also said there will be 3 data centers: West Coast, East Coast and Midwest. Three. So as far as building near the consumer... you pays yer money, you takes your chances, and the kid in Texas or North Dakota is going to be swearing as everyone beats the tar out of him online.
That being said, I would give up my beta key and every beta key from here to eternity if I could have a 30mbps connection. I'm jealous. But we're in America, and if AT&T and Verizon don't like your neighborhood, it's low speed for you!
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he's saying that you'll need to allow for a minimum of 80ms latency for every action you take, which according to Ron is "below the threshold of human perception."
That's great for people playing down the street from their servers, but the average user is more likely to see double that or worse. I wonder if the beta testers will be selected by location.
I don't get it. They seem to be marketing this as a way to play the high-end games without a high-end PC, but if the final result is a 720p resolution I can already do that just fine on my old Athlon 2500 desktop I stopped using 3 years ago.
