Folding@home<\/a>.<\/p>\nEssentially, it involves breaking large jobs with a high number of computations — computer game graphics certainly qualify — into smaller chunks, and assigning the work to a number of computers on a network.\u00a0 Here, OnLive plans to do all<\/em> of its computations off-site, only returning audio and video to the client.<\/p>\nThink about it from a logistical standpoint.\u00a0 If, say, the same number of gamers are playing Left4Dead<\/em> during peak hours as before, except they are all using OnLive’s service.\u00a0 Now, instead of millions of gamers each with their own mid- to high-performance PC, now we are looking at either a few less million top-shelf gaming rigs running in server farms, or a few more million mid-range PC’s running distributed workloads.<\/p>\nEither way, OnLive is looking at substantial start-up costs, not to mention big money every time the PR teams at nVidia and ATI so much as cough.\u00a0 Even if OnLive charges the same amount of money for their games as the retailers, subscribers are still looking at a hefty annual fee, likely much more so than Xbox Live’s service.<\/p>\n
And the pricetag is an important factor here.\u00a0 OnLive is marketing towards gamers who cannot afford top-of-the-line gaming rigs, but can still pay for the games.\u00a0 Even on the beta machines demoed at GDC, with nearly no traffic on OnLive’s servers, journalists noticed blurring and other signs of the video compression taking place.\u00a0 Therefore, the more OnLive charges, the larger the portion of their potential customer base that will slip into the category of consumers willing to pay the difference for a perfect picture.<\/p>\n
The good news about OnLive is that a MacBook user can run Hertz-hogs like Crysis<\/em> at near-max graphical settings.\u00a0 The bad news is that your game, with all its proprietary code and its beautiful art objects is on someone else’s machine<\/em>.<\/p>\nLet me go ahead and tackle the biggest issue right now.\u00a0 SecuRom cost EA a few dumptruck-loads of money.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because it gave gamers the sense that they were not really buying copies of Spore<\/em> and Mass Effect<\/em>.\u00a0 Oh, no.\u00a0 It was more like they were just letting gamers borrow their new toy.\u00a0 As long as they played with it in the corner.\u00a0 Where EA could see it.\u00a0 And god forbid if the gamers let three others play with it.<\/p>\nWhat companies like Steam and GameTap do not understand (or just ignore) is that a large portion of gamers still prefer hard copies to electronic.\u00a0 SecuRom shook their concept of a “hard” copy, and OnLive would deny the option entirely.\u00a0 Sure, I will pay $10 for Rainbow Six Vegas 2<\/em> on Steam when it is still $30 in the stores, but if the price was the same, or even within five bucks, I would drive the fifteen minutes to the nearest Best Buy or Gamestop instead of waiting on a download every time.\u00a0 Yes, it is mostly psychological, but it is a powerful deciding factor that retailers have been (rightly) counting on for years.<\/p>\nConsider also, that while console gamers are used to a product that fits on a disc, and, in their minds, is wholly contained on that disc, PC gamers know that the products they buy are not just neat contained games, but a finished product, and most of the tools used to make it<\/em>.\u00a0 If Half-Life<\/em> had been a console-specific title, then would Counter-Strike<\/em> have ever existed?<\/p>\nEven if OnLive develops a way to distribute major Mods for big PC titles, the best, strongest, or strangest ones will never make it, because OnLive cannot or will not recognize them.\u00a0 So what if Star Wars<\/em> has nothing to do with Morrowind<\/em>.\u00a0 Some modder put Darth Maul in Vivec, and a bunch of people enjoyed it.\u00a0 By outsourcing your game, you give up all rights to play it your way.<\/p>\nI have not mentioned the issue that most consider first when they hear about OnLive, but OnLive’s ability to handle massive amounts of internet traffic will certainly be tested from day one.\u00a0 Anyone who has played an online game from a regular residence (not a university or business) knows that internet connections rarely operate at their specified top speed, and that is not even the fault of the server host.\u00a0 Every online gamer has learned to play with lag, but how does that work when the game itself is remote?<\/p>\n
If data sent from the clients (OnLive subscribers) gets lost or delayed enroute to OnLive’s servers, then most games would probably interpret it as a lack of input.\u00a0 Basically, your character will stand still, while four different snipers draw a bead.\u00a0 On the other side, if clients cannot pull down the image data fast enough, the picture will start to pixellate, costing gamers precious detail.<\/p>\n
Again, online gamers may learn to live with that, but what about single-player<\/em> games?\u00a0 Imagine playing Resident Evil 5<\/em> and trying to keep up with the quick-time events when half of the response window is lost to lag.\u00a0 Rather, imagine cursing your ISP while you watch Sheva take a motorcycle tire to the face for the sixth time.<\/p>\nOne of the most enticing bits from the Perlman interview I saw linked on Kotaku (URL below) dealt with how OnLive would be, essentially, a TV-streaming service, where each user had their own interactive channel.\u00a0 With the signal in this state, it would be nothing to send this signal to other users, as well.\u00a0 You could bring up a list and see what your friends were playing at any given time, and heckle them at every wrong turn.\u00a0 You could watch the player at the top of a leaderboard, and learn from his moves.\u00a0 You could watch someone play a game you do not even own, because, hey, the code is not on his machine, either (yay!).\u00a0 Hell, you could even make your friend play through all the boring “gameplay” in a Kojima game while you pop popcorn for the next mov- err, cutscene.<\/p>\n
Again, stewing on this after doing the research, I realized that this is not really above current systems, though.\u00a0 Games like Command & Conquer 3 <\/em>already have spectator modes.\u00a0 Why not just take the feeds and move them out of the game? It would take some effort on developers’ parts to turn the output into video feeds instead of game data, but if the demand was there, they would probably bite the bullet.<\/p>\nOnLive smacks of potential.\u00a0 If the service could keep costs down, it could revitalize the PC gaming industry and put it leagues ahead of the console market, like it used to be.\u00a0 It would be a developer’s dream come true.\u00a0 No more piracy, and the guarantee that every gamer in the audience would be running the latest hardware.\u00a0 But for us gamers, few things are ever as good as the bullet points on the box, and reading between the lines is vital.\u00a0 With regards to OnLive, I read high costs and maddening lag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I first heard of OnLive last night, I did not think much of it.\u00a0 As I started going through the news stories and getting the impressions from industry heads (I could aim a low-blow to Denis Dyack here, but I will not), I admit the Kool-Aid started looking a bit tastier.\u00a0 Steve Perlman has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scopsblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scopsblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scopsblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scopsblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scopsblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/scopsblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49,"href":"http:\/\/scopsblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/49"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scopsblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scopsblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scopsblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}