OnLive: WebTV for gaming

[Zeus]

I'll have to see how this works. I still think people don't wanna pay a monthly fee to play the games they pay full price for and that the physical media has a greater value in most people's eyes

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6206620.ht ... story;more

[bovine]

it's an interesting idea because it negates the need for constantly updating hardware. Now you can play all games, ever, using this sort of video streaming. The hardware just needs to be updated server-side. I do LOVE having a videogame archive, but not ever having to update hardware, or lug around all my shit when I move seems like a pretty nice trade-off.

[Shellie]

Interesting concept, but I wonder how well it will work..

[Kupek]

Gamasutra article which is, unfortunately, still press-release, sound-bite heavy: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=22875

They don't say what the pricing model will be. Subscription, obviously, but the Gamasutra article alludes to the possibility for charging for access to certain games. Basically, you don't buy games, you subscribe to them. This could actually be cheaper than buying the physical media. In other words, I don't think you would pay full price for the games.

Zeus, I think you're more emotionally attached to physical media than most. That's not even the main idea behind this - that's what Steam is. This is subscribing to hardware.

[Tessian]

I don't know if I like it yet... but the concept is definitely interesting. If it can deliver what it promises, and the subscription fee is on par with Netflix, I think you'll find it becoming quite popular.

This would be a HUGE cost saving not only in hardware but in software. I don't have to purchase games, I just pay a monthly fee and play any of the latest games I want. Only catch would be what happens when the game you want to play stops being offered...they do warn they will only have the latest and greatest, they won't be GameTap.

I'm not ready to give up my computer... but it's definitely something to keep an eye on. And yes Zeus-- you're about the only one who really cares about physical media anymore. I find Steam MUCH more convenient and worthwhile then the stacks of game boxes and CD's I have from years past. If anything it's MORE reliable because I never have to worry about losing the disc or damaging it.

http://kotaku.com/5181300/onlive-makes- ... on-your-tv

[Zeus]

Zeus, I think you're more emotionally attached to physical media than most.

Actually, I'm very much in the majority. I posted an article here a while ago that showed about 75% of people value physical media at more than digital downloads. I'm just in the minority in the nerd community which makes up the majority of the other 25%.

It's basically the same idea except you're renting rather than owning a copy. Still the same diff when comparing to physical media.

I think one of the main issues with this subscription service is its reliance on the ISPs to work. We all know the infrastructure is in place to all such a large amount of data to be streamed but that don't mean most of the people have that level of service. And what about those of us who live in an unregulated capitalistic envirnoment and have to pay for each GB of download about a ridiculously small amount? Ain't no way Rogers or Bell customers will be happy paying for a subscription and/or individual game access AND watching their internet bill double at the same time.

On a side note, that's an extension of all of this new media streaming up here in Canada. If we ever did get Netflix (way to drop the ball on that one, CRTC) and people starting using it regularly, they'd see their internet bill go up as they fly past their usage limit.

[Kupek]

Subscribing to games and paying for bandwidth usage (which I think can be reasonable, but that's something we've already covered) can still end up being cheaper than buying hardware and physical games.

[Shellie]

Some pros and major cons of OnLive

[Zeus]

Subscribing to games and paying for bandwidth usage (which I think can be reasonable, but that's something we've already covered) can still end up being cheaper than buying hardware and physical games.

Not if you take into account resale value of physical media

[Kupek]

I didn't say it would. I said it can - as in, it's possible. We don't have numbers yet, so we don't know what the breakdown will be.

But is there even much of a market for used PC games? I think this service is most attractive in the PC gaming market because the upfront cost of a good gaming computer is much more than that of a console.

[Tessian]

Subscribing to games and paying for bandwidth usage (which I think can be reasonable, but that's something we've already covered) can still end up being cheaper than buying hardware and physical games.

Not if you take into account resale value of physical media

I don't know of ANY store that will accept used PC games, do you? Almost all PC games, by design, don't really permit reselling. CD keys and such, plus in most cases these days you don't need the CD to play the game.

[Zeus]

Yeah, EB takes them in still up here. And there are a few other stores which do as well. Now, unless they're brand new they ain't worth too much but there is a market

[SineSwiper]

This is the dumbest and most unrealistic idea I've heard in a while. Anybody that doesn't see it should read that article that Sera linked.

I mean, this is SERIOUSLY STUPID! All it takes is one spot of lag to fuck up the game, and then there's the issue that maybe the servers AREN'T powerful enough to handle the load. If Microsoft and Blizzard and Turbine and every other company can't handle load issues when shit gets popular, what the hell makes you think that some buttfucked company that nobody has ever heard of will be able to handle thousands of people playing Crysis with full quality settings?

All video compression is lossy, so trying to compress the video is counterproductive to their claims that they are running it on the max settings for the highest quality video.

We're talking about trying to stream full motion HD-quality video WITHOUT buffering and WITHOUT compression. That... is... fucking... impossible!

This almost sounds like some company trying to get their stocks up. This is vaporware, and I can't believe so many people are fucking talking about it.

[Zeus]

This is the dumbest and most unrealistic idea I've heard in a while. Anybody that doesn't see it should read that article that Sera linked.

I mean, this is SERIOUSLY STUPID! All it takes is one spot of lag to fuck up the game, and then there's the issue that maybe the servers AREN'T powerful enough to handle the load. If Microsoft and Blizzard and Turbine and every other company can't handle load issues when shit gets popular, what the hell makes you think that some buttfucked company that nobody has ever heard of will be able to handle thousands of people playing Crysis with full quality settings?

All video compression is lossy, so trying to compress the video is counterproductive to their claims that they are running it on the max settings for the highest quality video.

We're talking about trying to stream full motion HD-quality video WITHOUT buffering and WITHOUT compression. That... is... fucking... impossible!

This almost sounds like some company trying to get their stocks up. This is vaporware, and I can't believe so many people are fucking talking about it.

The idea is excellent and the wave of the future to many (not me; I'll reject this until I'm forced to use it). The problem is it's just not possible to implement based on our current infrastructure and ISP business model, particularly up here in Canada.

So I agree it's vapourware just for different reasons.

[Kupek]

I agree that it's difficult, but I disagree that it's impossible. Latency is the biggest problem, I think, not bandwidth.

[Tessian]

As others have said-- it's inevitably the future, just not the near future.

Anyone wanna care to guess how much bandwidth playing a HD game like this for an hour will eat up? As Zeus has pointed out it'd be impossible in Canada with their 40GB/month limit... but even Comcast's 200GB/month would probably cause problems for the avid gamer.

It's not vaporware-- the product DOES exist and it's been seen/played, but it won't live up to the hype/expectations. They have to deliver EXACTLY what they're promising or it will be a horrible failure.

[SineSwiper]

I like what somebody said in the article linked:

The speed of light is a fixed constant that makes latency a non-negotiable problem for any sort of effort like OnLive and an army of developers are busily explaining on the internet right now how there is no way to avoid dropping frames from any game due to it, return rates, etc.

C is fixed. The rate of data transmission across optical is generally 33-66% of C depending on conditions (and not counting packet routing etc).

Server side "proper" game is a dream. We've seen these sorts of claims before about instant compression and the like and they always fall apart because whatever the coolness of the compression it is never a 0ms operation to unzip, interpret and re-submit instructions back to it. It doesn't matter how lean the packets are.

Server-side gaming can never beat the locality of a processor for transmission speeds, which is why it is best suited for network gaming between two local machines. At least in that scenario latency can be corrected and adjusted, but it can't if the whole thing is server-side.

C is a physical constant. End of argument.

And another thing, even if our bandwidth can download the entire contents of the Interwebs in .000027 whatever-the-fuck-is-smaller-than-nanoseconds, all it takes is some amount of lag to fuck up the gameplay, because several thousand people are downloading the entire contents of the Interwebs 20 times each, or watching some streaming holovideo on their 1166400p SEHDTVs, or whatever else they do in the 2050s.

Just look at the different between 56K modems and broadband. Sure, you can download pages at different speeds, but what is still there? Lag. Latency is still a constant. You could be watching a movie, and look, something lags and you have to stop doing what you're doing. And that's WITH a buffer. The buffer hides all of the hiccups in-between.

And if all of that hasn't sunk in, let's just look at the FPS argument. (Frames per second, dammit!) Just to make sure that it doesn't look like a jerky piece of shit, you'll need to get a 30-60fps frame rate. So, 1/60s is going to be 16ms. It currently takes my connection 75 fucking milliseconds just to send a 64 byte ping packet on a round-trip to Google, the most popular web site on the fucking planet with more servers than ET games buried in the Nevada desert. Even if I doubled that to 32ms, that's not going to cut it.

Also, they'd have to split up that huge HDTV frame into 1440-byte chucks. That's a lot of packets just for ONE frame. If we took an 1280x768 frame, which is about a 1MB each, that would be 683 packets per frame. If any of those packets fuck up, there is no re-transmission in UDP, so you would have to piece that frame together the best you can, and wait for the next one to come along, because asking for stale frames doesn't make sense.

There's a damn good reason why video and UDP don't mix. It's a stupid idea.

[SineSwiper]

It's not vaporware-- the product DOES exist and it's been seen/played, but it won't live up to the hype/expectations. They have to deliver EXACTLY what they're promising or it will be a horrible failure.

It has been played in a controlled situation with 20 feet of cable. As soon as you add the 5-10 hops it takes to get there with the popularity totally crushing their servers, it will be worse than Age of Conan on launch day. Something more like the The Pitt on launch day, except twenty times worse.

[Tessian]

It's not vaporware-- the product DOES exist and it's been seen/played, but it won't live up to the hype/expectations. They have to deliver EXACTLY what they're promising or it will be a horrible failure.

It has been played in a controlled situation with 20 feet of cable. As soon as you add the 5-10 hops it takes to get there with the popularity totally crushing their servers, it will be worse than Age of Conan on launch day. Something more like the The Pitt on launch day, except twenty times worse.

I'm not claiming it will work as advertised, but I AM saying that it is NOT vaporware by definition. A shitty product that doesn't live up to the hype doesn't count as vaporware because it's still a product. This isn't Duke Nukem Forever; it will be released it just won't do be any good.

Vaporware is a term used to describe a software or hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product.