| pb1285n said: Why do we have such a hard time grasping new technology. I think it may take a while for the technology to catch up with us, but eventually streaming games will be a staple in the game industry (whether OnLive fails or not). The same thing happened to the movie and audio industry. |
The trouble is that streaming games requires a lot more than streaming movies. You could easily stream a movie from server which is 5000 miles away but game would have noticeable lag even if server is just 500 miles away (or even less). And no technology now or in the future can remove that completely (unless someone knows how to break laws of physics). Lag doesn't matter to neither streaming music nor movies but it is very important for gaming. Not to mention that servers would have to be a lot more powerful than movie servers unless you want PS2 graphics.
To create worldwide network to stream games for millions of people right now would require more money than development budgets of PS3, 360, and Wii combined. It definitely wouldn't be cheap.
There are also several other issues. Old games or less sold games will probably be automatically deleted from servers because those would not create profits but wastes space from server. Even though server space is cheap, it still cost something. Because you don't own game, they have no oblication to keep them forever. One example is MS which has deleted several games from XBLA (owners of the game can still re-download them though but no one else can purchase them anymore).
