The biggest news item coming out of the Game Developers Conference, an event that's not meant for news at all, was the unveiling of OnLive. Worked on in secret for years now, and barging through the door with partners such as UbiSoft, Take Two, Epic, and EA, this may be the future of gaming if all goes as planned. Granted though, it's from the guys behind WebTV which some may have seen as the future of surfing the internet and we all know how that panned out. My sources on most of the information about this, as I wasn't at GDC, are 3 podcasts, Giant Bombcast, Listen Up, and the Joystiq podcast, but here's what I know so far.
It seems to be OnDemand for video games basically. You can log in, via a set top box, a computer, or possibly a game console at some point. When you play a game through this, you aren't in direct control though. Essentially, the game video is streamed to your tv or computer monitor, you press a button on your controller and that button press is sent back to the server which makes your character respond. If all works as they say, this means you could play extremely high end games with the best graphics around and in HD, on your crappy old laptop. Thus, eliminating the need for pimping out your computers with the newest graphics cards so that you can keep up with the latest in gaming.
Will this be the future of gaming? The creators say that they will launch it this year, with five server locations, and according to them anyone within one thousand miles of one of them will have virtually no lag. If it truly works that well then I can see this succeeding, but I can imagine sending all the content across hundreds of miles would result in an extremely slow gameplay experience. If it takes 10 seconds for your character to respond to your button press, then the whole thing is broken. There's also the problem of service providers having bandwidth limits. Comcast has a limit of 250gb per month, which seems like a lot for streaming these games, but when factoring in other activities and other users within the household, it can add up real fast.
We'll have to wait and see. Will it work the way it is promised to, and if it doesn't, will they be able to provide the additional support for it to? If no one adapts it initially because living a thousand miles from a server farm means your experience is broken, then will they have the cash to set up more server areas, or will they call it a failed experiment and give up? I'm certainly curious to find out, but I'm definitely not getting my hopes up.
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5 comments:
If this works it will be great. I miss playing games on my computer.
Yeah, I was never a big PC gamer simply because our computers have always been crappy. If I could buy a cheap box to connect to this and play the newest games I would definitely do it. I don't think I'm going to be very close to one of the 5 server farms though, unless they put one in Detroit. New York is probably the closest I'll be at the beginning and who knows if that far a distance will work like they say it will.
Yea. I'll most likley be in a prime location. That is if I get into the schools I applied to here in NY. If not I'll have to go with my mom and brother to texas and see where I go from there.
Well if they've got 5 locations and want maximum coverage I would think it would be New York, Chicago, LA, Florida and Texas. So you might not be out of luck then either.
I hate to say this, but I would not waste the pickles in relish on this platform.
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