What If Your Game Console Was Just A Video Stream?

There's something about controlling something physically that makes you feel like, well, that you own it. Cloud computing is interesting, and may work for some things, but at the end of the day I want to know where my stuff is, and I want no one else to have access to it. I guess I'm not quite so sure the companies that provide these services are 1) trustworthy of my confidence, and 2) going to survive for the rest of my life. I also have a feeling it would be hard to mod a cloud-computing oriented game.

I'm suspicious of a 'April's Fools Day' prank in the works here.

"GioVANNI said:

"I'm suspicious of a 'April's Fools Day' prank in the works here."

I really hope you're right."

"I'm suspicious of a 'April's Fools Day' prank in the works here."

I like the concept, but I'd exceed my isp's bandwidth cap pretty quickly.  And thats without taking into account the internet usage of everyone else in the house. Unless the Onlive guys have taken that into account somehow this smells like failure right out of the gate.

That pic looks awful and like an april fool's joke.

But whether this particular application is doomed to fail or is an april fool's joke or not, technologies like these ARE being researched by others. Also, how much fail is it to make april fool's jokes before april fool's, and just reveal they were jokes on that day? Be moar creative.

This will not end well.

Wasn't  WebTV ahead of it's time?  I think he's once again about 5 years too soon for this to work right.  It's a cool concept and I look forward to some research in that direction but I think it's too soon.

A downloadable game network is more probable.  Like Gametap and the like where all the games are downloaded to your HD console with no physical media. 

If I were a PC gamer, I would be thrilled with this concept. Hell, the only reason I DON"T game on PC is because of the cost and hastle of upgrading it to keep up with the next big game. So maybe that's a small win for the service right there.

As for playing console games on this service, right off the bat you are looking at 3rd party titles only, obviously. No Halo, no Mario, no God of War 3. Unless the service envelopes the entire gaming market, making Sony, Nintendo, and MS 3rd parties all creating games for it, there's little point for a regular console  gamer to pick OnLive. Maybe they can find success with casual or thrifty gamers who havent bought a current gen console. GTA4 or Madden 10, without needing a 360 or PS3? Could be tempting.

 Since OnLive would destroy used game sales, as well as the costs of manufacturing and shipping physical media, gamers will expect to pay less to "own" or "rent" through OnLive. If a 60 dollar game on 360 is made available day-and-date OnLive for 30, that sounds great, depending how much the subscription rates are on top of that. If the service itself is 20 bucks monthly, then you have to buy several games per month to find any real savings compared to consoles. If you have to pay x amount to get the OnLive hardware, then roughly 250 bucks a year, EVERY year just to use said hardware, OnlLive will fail. If the service is close to the 50 dollars that XBOXLIVE costs, AND the games are half price-ish, then sign me up...............

.............assuming that OnLive actually works. AND that Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo don't create virtually the exact same thing WITH their first party libraries.

ill admit this, as revolutionary as it sounds, I don't like it...

this seems like a interesting device.  but a lot problems, like no PS/2 ports.  last time i checked Winpc gamers will not use a controller.  they refuse!!! now those 2 usb ports are to connect a controller or keyboard and mouse?? hmm isnt it strange most winpcs us PS/2 for their inputs.  which means that device is kinda useless.  another thing i like the idea having it in the cloud because i pc game sometimes but i dont upgrade my hardware unless its old.  i mostly make videos and edit photos in CS4.  but its a good idea less stress on your computer for me i am a controller kinda of guy and that controller is like the 360 controller.  so if they support it i would spend the 50bucks for a 360 controller.  feels better than something else but i prefer ps3 ( thats my default console)( not a fanboi) another thing i would like to see the price because this service is aimed at people like me console users that dont upgrade their pcs for games.  so i am game to look at this

All of my keyboards and mice in the last 4 1/2 years have been usb.

it depends on the developers and how they feel about this. I dont see them getting Halo, or God of war, unless they pay Sony and Microsoft. So exclusives are probably out the window. This is pretty much another console. Let the 4 way battle begin.

There is no way this can work in the real world. It will make for a nice demo at GDC on a local network, but expecting this to work properly over currently available residential broadband connections is ridiculous.

i am really interested in this
dont know if it will turn out though

"this seems like a interesting device.  but a lot problems, like no PS/2 ports.  last time i checked Winpc gamers will not use a controller.  they refuse!!! now those 2 usb ports are to connect a controller or keyboard and mouse?? hmm isnt it strange most winpcs us PS/2 for their inputs.  which means that device is kinda useless.  another thing i like the idea having it in the cloud because i pc game sometimes but i dont upgrade my hardware unless its old.  i mostly make videos and edit photos in CS4.  but its a good idea less stress on your computer for me i am a controller kinda of guy and that controller is like the 360 controller.  so if they support it i would spend the 50bucks for a 360 controller.  feels better than something else but i prefer ps3 ( thats my default console)( not a fanboi) another thing i would like to see the price because this service is aimed at people like me console users that dont upgrade their pcs for games.  so i am game to look at this"

I like it but i want to bring my console to places that might not have internet but have a tv so until we get crazy coverage of internet all over the world wirelessly this isn't practical

Just watched the GDC press conference and I'm a little dumbstruck to be honest. This could be an epic waste of 7 years development or simply be the most epic thing to have happened to the industry in years. I wish them the best of luck and I really hope it works out. Only a 5Mbps line required at most they say, awsome! I have 20Mbps fibre so if or when it hits the UK and Europe I'll be checking it out for sure.

Also it could be great for combating piracy and that has to be good for every dev and pub out there.

Meh. It wont be the end to console or PC gaming thats for sure. But i really like how their giving gamers a chance to play some games that they might not have been able to play because they dont own a high end PC. I've never played Crysis and i really want to. If this gives me a chance i might look into it. But if im paying for this i wouldnt want to pay anything more then 60 bills a year or so.

Oh god, I hope that the next Penny Arcade is about Onlive.

It's got potential. Mobile gaming would be a very viable possibility with a fast wi-fi connection. The logistics and costs for this venture must be absurd though. Throw HD videos and music on it and you got a super computer on whatever you can hook up hdmi to. Too bad that my DSL connection would keel over using this service.

If the lag for this is negligible, then I am all for it.

The device is going to have some problems no matter what :

Compression artifacts in live stream video will make even 720p not look so great (most probably).  There will be no reason for them to run any AA or anisotropic filtering in the games because they'll be destroyed by any compression.  Might as well turn down texture detail as well.

Latency will be bearable in the best case, unplayable in the worst case, no way they're getting past standard ping times.  In the absolute best case scenario, we're they're building right on the backbone like Google, we're talking an extra 50ms (back and forth), more likely to be 180ms+ with processing times, not counting any display lag.  They talk about the latency being less than human perception, but latency in games is ADDED to the human image processing times, so for any game, you're getting more than 200ms of lag, in the best case of this, we're talking more than 350ms.

ISP bandwidth caps are going to be a problem unless these guys actually cut the ISPs in on the profits.

I think money making will be hard for them unless they charge a LOT for subscriptions and game rentals / purchases.  Think of someone playing Crysis over their system, they're playing on probably at least $1000 of hardware, but they can't charge that much just to play the game.  1 person will use up one whole Crysis machine for a period of time.  With people popping in and out of games, you can probably have 10-20 people on a single machine at the very most.  That's just a single game.

With a service like this, unless they're very sucessful, you run a VERY large risk of losing any games you 'purchase' on the system.  Personally I like the idea of having my own gaming hardware and software, and if your net goes down or gets unstable for any period of time, forget playing any games at all.

Streaming is not yet replacing traditional media or downloading for simpler things like movies or music, and they wanna take it 10 steps further already. Not happening in our life time. I can see it working for some MMORPG-esque project like the one linked by a few people here, but not as a means to play a large variety of games, or any game people want for that matter.

I think this is either going to do well or totally flop.

I love the concept. But, you pointed it out, Jeff, 80 ms will add up over time. I'd really like my gaming experiences to be fluid, regardless of lag. ...so maybe if we had FiOs, we'd be talking.

It will be the end of Piracy. I hope they won't get turned down by developers like Valve back in 2000.

It will also be yet another middle man for you to pay your cash to. Yeah we don't have enough of those!

I got a hunch this is an April Fool's joke...

No lapboard?

Just watched the stream of the video presentation given by the company and they indicated that they were running on their beta network.  The process was remarkably simply and with a 1.5mbs connection for standard def or 5mbs for a 720p 60fps the internet requirements are within current tech here in the UK.  Issues of bandwidth caps and lag were discussed but not really addressed in full.  This does seem very promising for the pc games business (my current understanding is that they are streaming the pc versions of games and have no plans for emulating consoles or running 360/ps3 software) and it should be interesting to see where all this goes.  The tech does appear very ambitious, but 7 years in development is a long time, whether this is the next big thing or just the next thing I guess we can only wait and see.

LAG SUCKS.

might have worked 10 years ago
won't give a damn about it now

80ms = fail

No thanks.

I enjoy collecting a physical copy of the games I play.

Other people already pointed this out, but having L, I, V, E face buttons is not very bright, and shows (IMO) that these guys are hoping to attract investors instead of customers.

Dude this all still sounds like insane voodoo magic. I can't wait to see how it really performs.

This is actually something I'm really looking forward to

This crap will have a monthly fee probably around $50!! That's like $600 a year! You can buy a PS3 and a Wii with that much!!! lol Plus you gotta rent games, if you want to play them again after the time is up you gotta rent it again and its not gonna be free. Plus im sure there will be lag and down time problems.

So pretty much you will be paying a lot of money to stream PC games (Who the hell buys PC games?) and you will never get to own the hardware or the games.

OnLive = FAIL.

awful.

I live in uruguay, thats in south america, try to understand the amount of bandwith we have over here... so the problem for me to run this thing is one word: LAG.

I knew this sort of thing would come eventually, I just didn't think we would have something like it already, can't wait to see it in action.

Kinda strange to think about it from a collector's view though, there won't be much to collect when consoles are just small black boxes with everything else at a server farm somewhere. I guess game collecting will end up being more like collecting antiques... hmm maybe I should cash in now and buy loads of stuff...

Haha i remember my dad used to have web TV back in the day. We didnt have a mouse or keyboard though so we had to use this remote it came with. You had to cycle through clickable links with directional buttons, sorta like constantly pressing tab to to get to where you need. And when you wanted to send an email it  would bring up a whole keyboard and and you would have to select and enter the letters with a remote. It kinda sucked but then again this was like late 90's i remember i still had a playstaton.

According to the CEO, its not 80ms, it's friggin' 1ms

Depending on pricing, I'll be first in line to try this out, but I remain highly skeptical that it will work.  Even if it is flawless, there are a lot of issues that could occur on the consumer's end (like hardware, ISP, etc.) and then to them it might as well be OnLive's fault.

This makes baby jesus cry.  I would rather pay more for a physical product than some download.   This thing will probably fail, but there will be a more refined one soon.   This is what the big companies want in the end but as far the consumer in me, I say no way.