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Forums - Sales - OnLive - THE END of fanboys wars?

NJ5 on 01 April 2009
mrstickball said:
PDF said:
^^ You obviously know far more than I do and I assume what you say is true but honestly. Is there any bit of bias you may have simply because you work for the competition?

In your professional opinion how long before OnLive becomes market ready and do you have a guess on how much one of those boxes would cost. I dont mean how long before the tech will be good enough to where you see it working but just when do you think OnLive will launch.

and no I wont buy your flying car. I have my money in teleporting =]

I'm not biased because I work for a rival. It's just the simple truth that OnLive is pushing a technology that just isn't feasable.

The question of OnLive being market ready is more a question of 'How much will it work, and for how many people?' - Something like OnLive could of been invented years ago, and used. It's not an amazing, revolutionary technology. Your simply paying a company to remotely access their desktop to play a game.

I'm going to assume the box will cost around $100-150 to buy...Not the cheapest thing in the world. OnLive should launch in beta later this year. I'm unsure when it'll come out of beta, but it may be awhile.

Again, it all comes down to the penetration of high-speed broadband lines (5MB/s connections aren't the most prolific connections out there) and how many server farms OnLive has. For this kind of system to work, and work well, you'd need a server farm every few miles...Which is the big cost issue. Server farms cost money...Lots of money. Add in the fact you need to establish them all over the world, as close to consumers as possible, and it's going to be an incredibly expensive task.

Because of those things, it's just not going to be really viable. Chances are, your going to find an OnLive server hundreds of miles away from your house, and any game you want to play will be unplayable due to lag, and/or the connection you have.

In the future, when bigger, better, computers are more prolific, and games aren't resource hogs, and everyone has FiOS, I can see this becoming popular. But the time it'll take for the supporting structures to allow something like OnLive to work is...Going to be awhile.

 

I think the box could well cost $50-$100 and still be sold at a profit. Sony is selling the PS2 for $99, this box doesn't need anywhere near that amount of power. It shouldn't be more than an Ethernet port, video decompression chip, Bluetooth for controllers and a small CPU / microcontroller.

Regarding the end of the Beta version, the site says this:

  • When will OnLive be available?
    OnLive is currently in internal Beta, and we expect to have an external Beta to gamers around the US this summer. If you’d like to help Beta test, sign-up here. We plan to make OnLive available in Winter 2009.

 



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mrstickball on 01 April 2009

PDF - correct.

Your using your internet connection to connect to another computer, and use it's resources (ie, it's computational power) to play a game on that computer, and then stream the results to your monitor.

That takes time (the time to send data from your computer to that computer, process the results, and send it back to you), and then the data associated with streaming the results back to you in a video.

On your home computer, the results are done instantaneously. Magnify that time by thousands, and you have OnLive or any remote-access system.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

Deneidez on 01 April 2009
mrstickball said:
PDF - correct.

Actually that would be wrong. Remote desktop usage is nothing like what OnLive will be.  On remote desktop theres only few colors and packing is very easy because everything doesn't change all the time on the screen. In games however just about every pixel does change all the time. Unless... of course one makes static GUIs & stuff to ease the burden. ;)



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Black RL on 01 April 2009

@kowenicki

Good interview!




mrstickball on 01 April 2009

...You think that 35-40ms lag input is going to be good for gaming?



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

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mrstickball on 01 April 2009

40ms is 1/25th of a second. It may not seem like much, but for any shooter, it won't work very well. Especially when your attempting to play any game in multiplayer, or against AI.

Think about it: If your playing a shooter, the CPU is going to be about 40ms ahead of you at any given moment. That may not seem like a lot, but it's already reacting and doing things before you even get the chance to do anything.

For a turn based game, it may not be too bad. But anything that's done in real time will be a nightmare.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

Black RL on 01 April 2009

@mrstickball

I don't think it's going to be a problem, some of the games you play right now have HORST lag than that.

@kowenicki

Totally agreed! It seems awesome! Imagine the normal TV, imagine the normal DVD, did you notice how many years you use them? Without buying a new? The same will happen with OnLive, they are the ones that have to invest in hardware.

It seems really amazing.




theprof00 on 01 April 2009

I'm pretty sure Comcast is going to institute a download cap sometime in the future and you will have to pay extra for passing the cap.



the2bears on 01 April 2009
Black RL said:
But everyone agrees that it looks really revolutionary!

I don't really think it's that exciting or interesting.  Having a networking background I don't see this really working all that well.  Time will tell I suppose.

 

 



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largedarryl on 01 April 2009

I still fail to see how this type of a service is capable of dealing with internet traffic delays. Even if you are capable of getting the appropriate throughput on your internet connection, this doesn't mean your ping speed (or changes in ping speed) has magically dropped to an acceptable speed for gaming.