GDC: OnLive Promises Cloud Gaming, Mumbles About Quality
At the start of GDC, OnLive has announced it’s cloud gaming product. A $100 box that will plug into your HDTV, or access via web browser on your Mac or PC, allowing them to experience high-end gaming graphics regardless of the video card in your system. OnLive claims that their system uses high-end servers to stream and process modern-console gaming quality and compress it to stream over the internet.
The company claims that you will only need about a 1.5 mbps connection for “… standard definition quality gaming” and 4 to 5 mbps for “high definition quality gaming.”
However, few are noting what OnLive is hoping you won’t notice. Namely, that all of the A+ games they are demonstrating, won’t be available when the system comes out. OnLive notes, when pressed, that game developers will have to make new games (with lower graphics and quality) in order to run on their processing servers.
OnLive defends this arguably smoke-and-mirrors decision by claiming that OnLive-developed games will be able to eventually reach this quality.
Some have already compared OnLive to the failed company Pixelon, which promised similar video latency targets. Other critics claim OnLive is another Phantom, while others call it a breakthrough in cloud gaming. Sound off in the comments with your take on OnLive.
[...] your web browser. I’m not going to poke holes here in OnLive (though I did that quite nicely over there). But it’s safe to say that it is a massive bandwidth hog. While the developers claim it [...]
I was wondering what your source is for this info. I’m not saying you’re wrong, it’s just that, I watched the OnLive press conference/Q & A session and from that I gathered the following:
A price has not been decided on for the Micro Console (box)
The Micro Console is needed to play on your TV and a 1 mb web browser plugin is all you need to play on your PC/Mac
The games will be the newest releases running at maximum settings
There were a couple of typos, so we’ve clarified a bit more that the MicroConsole is not needed for the Mac or PC versions. The MicroConsole is meant to replace a console on your HDTV.
As to the information regarding pricing, we pressed OnLive quite a bit at GDC (there wasn’t anything else going on… really). The answer that we got was that it would be dramatically less than the cost of Wii, and we were told in the $100 to $150 range was the “goal”.
As to the quality issue… that’s not quite correct. The OnLive team has said that these “existing” games will likely not make the launch list, and that “original” games will be featured. As for the “newest” games, they will offer HD option when quality permits (latency and bandwidth both).
In short, we don’t know what to expect from a launch list. Nor is it really clear the performance of final games, since OnLive is really being used in a pre-production environment. Apple did the same at Macworld with QuickTime TV… that looked great, but failed in the marketplace. Still, a beta release this summer should start to address those lingering questions.