OnLive: The Future Is Coming
Ever wonder what the future looks like? Well take a peek now.Published 30/12/2009 at 15:25 by cc_star
OnLive Set To Launch [32]
TC’s Massive Poll Results : Week 4 [16]
TC’s Massive Poll: On Demand Gaming [62]
We’ve had a look at OnLive on a few occasions before, but other than some marketing spiel haven’t seen too much of it in action. OnLive is a games on-demand service which gives anyone the ability to play any game on their TV, PC or Mac via a broadband connection. The game is ‘hosted’ on a remote server which does all the processing and streams the game to your browser (via a tiny plug-in) or to an OnLive console (expected to be $99 or free with subscription) Apparently anyone with a connection greater than 1.5mbps will be able to play in SD, whereas users with 5mbps connection will get the full HD treatment.
I could spend ages taking about it, as I’m hugely excited by the technology and hope it will mean an end to buying a new console every 5 years or so (even more often if they break down, hey Mr. YLoD!) and then worrying about whether my expensive back catalogue of games will be compatible, of course where this leaves Sony and a possible PS4 isn’t known, but billions of dollars of possible investment in chip technologies may be put to better use exploring ‘remote gaming’ opportunities of their own.
Anyway enough talk – take a look at the vid below which at the 12min mark shows the OnLive UI, Crysis Wars running on a fairly low specced Mac at 720p 60fps and amazingly even iPhone connectivity.
Source: GamerTag Radio.
Comments
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legalisemurder | 30/12/2009 17:34
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I like the playstation brand.I would take a PS4 with guaranteed HD for all purchasers with decent tvs and games on discs over anything that relies on our broadband network.Also for online play your game could be lagging twice over.No thanks.
Raen | 31/12/2009 10:19
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Um the lag would be next to zero, you’d be playing with other gamers on the OnLive service (in the same way you can only play with other Xbox or PlayStation owners), meaning that you’d be in the same data centre (or maybe one of two) if you were in the UK. Yes there may be some lag concerns playing with other countries, but I’d take a huge, dedicated line’s lag over my local internet.
Cjdamon042 | 30/12/2009 17:47
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The tech is very impressive and I can see it being a god send for a lot of people. But I dunno. For me personally, I like spending all that money every 5 or so years getting new consoles :p. It’s exciting. Plus I’m one of those who actually prefer having a retail copy of things. I can’t hold my copy of a game if it’s on a server some place else.
Yes it’s great, it’ll help a ton of people and it makes sense on paper, but if this thing did take off and replace consoles and stuff, I’d feel upset :/
MF6465 | 30/12/2009 17:49
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You are all saying that in a few years the Broadband connection in this country will be improved. But according to all the big electronics companies the future is 3D. It had such high transfer rates they cannot even stream it to a T.V over a a service like sky. It has to run above 120fps at least. The question is If this releases in 3-4 years will the U.K and worldwide broadband network be fast enough for 15mb/s+. if the answer is no then i can’t see this taking of. 3D gaming in 1080p is the future for the next gen consoles.
CaptainMurdo | 30/12/2009 18:03
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If they can’t stream 3D to Sky then why is it planned for release next year by Sky themselves?
MF6465 | 30/12/2009 19:04
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Your right. Sorry i read that they couldn’t like 5 days ago. Must have been wrong. They are actually planing to broadcast the World cup in 3D. Sort of makes my argument null.
MUKARKAR | 30/12/2009 17:51
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is it only pc games?
Michael | 30/12/2009 21:28
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It’s whatever games people are willing to pay for.
MUKARKAR | 31/12/2009 06:01
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no way thats a big WOW
o_O shocking….
X_Yoshy_X | 30/12/2009 17:54
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thats a very good pont cus i cant see Sony or Micro$oft giving away there exclusives
cc_star | 30/12/2009 17:56
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They aren’t mentioned in the publishers which have signed up along with Activision, but everybody else is including EA, Ubisoft & Take2
3shirts | 30/12/2009 17:58
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The only sticking point I see for this system is the UK broadband infrastructure. Give it a few years and this could well be the replacement of consoles but at the moment you have a greatly reduced pool of potential market.
That said, I get 6Mb and would be very interested if the price is right!
cc_star | 30/12/2009 18:02
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In June the average UK speed (according to Ofcom, TC!) was 4.1meg this is up from January’s 3.6meg, in current real world testing on speedtest.net the average speed is 5.54meg, so it may not be years that are needed, but months (if that) before Mr Joe Average can use the service in HD.
BAGPUS | 31/12/2009 08:40
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Be careful with averages, they very often mask the whole truth. People with 50mb cable connections could be greatly skewing the averages of broadband speeds, does anywhere produces stats based on connection type rather than bundling them together?
cc_star | 31/12/2009 09:00
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Dunno about more stats, but people with ultra-shit connections will also be skewing the average down, and it is most likely the people with problem connection which will be carrying out speedtests, so if we were to use Occam’s Razor and discount 50meg connection along with those with ultra crap connection we’d still end up with a figure close to or the same as the average.
duncanuaz | 30/12/2009 19:09
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My internet connection varies from 2 to 4 meg depending on its mood, but in a house with me on PS3, my son on xbox 360, wife on laptop and other son watching crap on youtube how would it work? Could me and my son have an onlive box each? Don’t think so. So, for the foreseeable future it’s consoles for us.
bunimomike | 30/12/2009 19:39
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Haha… love it. We’re talking contention ratio problems at the exchange but ones in the house are still important!
xdarkmagician | 30/12/2009 19:56
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This is one of those things that looks great on paper, but I’m sceptical of how it’ll work under real world conditions. Since this “console’s” target audience is a small market of online gamers, inside of a market of normal gamers, it doesn’t give them any room for mistakes, especially when the Big 3 all ready hold most of the industry by it’s throat. I feel that this service is too hardcore for the causal gamer, and too soft for the hardcore gamer. It might have success in the PC/Mac niche, but it doesn’t have big enough legs to run with the big dogs. And just because major publishers have signed on doesn’t mean it’s going to work. Does anybody think MS isn’t going to start throwing $ around for more exclusive content. Or that Onlive will not suffer from cheap and poor ports, look at how poor the PS3 is treated and it has a respectable user base. There are just too many issues for Onlive to overcome to survive, and that’s not counting the numerous internet issues.
cc_star | 30/12/2009 20:33
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Porting isn’t an issue as standard PC version of games will work
Deathbrin | 30/12/2009 20:03
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OnLive idea is great (goodbye 2k$-worth PCs and “sandwich”-type videocards) and i’d love to use that (as a console with a gamepad (which looks awesome! love it) connected to a TV), but the main problem is it’s going to be highly region-dependent; the servers should be close enough to users to get that incredible speed for realtime HD/gamepad cooperation. The only ones who are going to get most of it are people living in US and maybe later in some European countries. It’s going to take decades to get widespread, if it’s going to. With a console you can pretty much always go to a store and buy it, while OnLive is going to stay far away or in “amazing” vids on YouTube either forever or at least far too long.
What’s good is the competition is going to offer something that would benefit ones sticking to the “real” consoles.
cc_star | 31/12/2009 09:15
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Their data server has a range of 1000 miles, they have also over come the problem of random Internet routing and their streaming and compression technology takes into account congested and unreliable networks, so any problems and objections that people can forsee has already been thought of and either worked around or taken into account.
Apnomis | 30/12/2009 20:05
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The only thing that I’m not buying into at this stage is the pricing – the key thing with Retail is that they make enough margin to flex their pricing, I’m yet to pay full RRP for any game. It’s a similar problem with the PSN now – why pay £24.99 to download something like GT:Prologue when you could buy it online with a box/disc/manual for £17.99? Just go to a publishers online store like EA.com where they have games for download for £39.99 that Game.co.uk currently have on sale for £19.99!
The tech is very impressive, but at the end of the day you are subscribing to a distribution monopoly on games where you are entirely at the mercy of the publishers when it comes to content pricing – everyone was enraged that Activision slapped a £55 price tag on MW2, but that didn’t matter because very few people paid that and indeed most paid £25! You wouldn’t have that luxury with OnLive – it would be £55 or nothing… Also many gamers rely on the game-trading facility of retail stores to fund their purchases, so surely that will affect sales if they are not only forced to pay full RRP but also don’t get anything back when they’ve finished with them?
Maybe OnLive should charge by the hour instead, at least that way Publishers will have to put a bit more effort into the content, quality and playability of their games rather than just the marketing of them, and at least that will stop people getting stung into paying full RRP for a rubbish game with no means to recoup the cost of it… I suppose you could just go and spy on someone else playing it in the Arena instead!
CaptainMurdo | 30/12/2009 20:22
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I’m not 100% sure on this but I think I remember reading early on that OnLive would offer a subscription based on time allowing users to play any game for a certain length of time rather than buying the full game. I’ll try to find the page but that was a while ago.
cc_star | 30/12/2009 20:31
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According the vid it supports unlimited free access to demos (and betas) a rental model and an all you can eat subscription (which also means you get the console free) He also mentioned ad supported models, and publisher promotions.
TSBonyman | 30/12/2009 20:43
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i can’t do the maths… anyone know how much bandwidth will this use per hour?
cc_star | 30/12/2009 20:53
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1.5mbps is 187MB per hour
5mbps is 625MB per hour
… I think
TSBonyman | 30/12/2009 21:22
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Hmmm then averaging 6 hours per day that’s going to be close to 30Gb per month at 1.5mps, which is a hefty chunk of my 50Gb monthly cap, especially when it’s just for gaming and i don’t get to keep anything i download.
And i guess 5Mbs would result in over 100Gb per month … :O
You think you folks got it bad in the UK? I live in Ireland …. there are one or two ISPs offering decent speeds but if you aren’t in their area you have to make do. I had to get a phone line installed and pay line rental for a phone i never use …7Mb, 50Gb cap, €60 per month.
cc_star | 30/12/2009 21:46
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I’ve got a 20GB peak time cap (although it is unlimited midnight till 8 which is when I do my PSN downloading) history teaches us that download caps go up along with bandwidth, so who know what the future will bring.
bunimomike | 30/12/2009 23:21
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The fibre option should be able to cope but I know old exchanges (and even some LLUs) will buckle/suffer. Caps and throttling is still going to happen for a while (in the sense that it might always happen but right now it will feel very tangible). God knows BT are utter swines for it. They used to cap us from our shitty 1Mbit line down to 512Kbit in the evenings. Seriously… tossers!
Appreciate this reply is more a rant at current ADSL limitations. *breathes*
Raen | 31/12/2009 10:26
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Ok 1.5Mbps is 0.1875MBps (divide by 8 to get from bits to bytes). Multiply by 60 and you have 11.25MBpm (per minute) and multiply by 60 again you have 675MBph (per hour). The same maths buts a 5Mbps connection at 2.25GBph. If my maths is overtly wrong let me know, but i’m fairly certain I’m right.
bunimomike | 31/12/2009 11:43
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So with two hours of HD gaming a night and you’ve smashed through BT’s bandwidth cap. Tits… that means a month of slowness for the subsequent month. Sure, the answer is to leave BT and go elsewhere but it’s a fair old ramp-up in bandwidth.
Here’s a quick question: Does two hours of gaming online (on the PS3) take the same bandwidth? I’m guessing it’s a totally different answer. You are NOT allowed to answer “it takes close to zero bytes as you won’t be able to get online”
Raen | 31/12/2009 11:48
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Ok with the PS3 (or any other platform) it varies vastly from game to game. It depends on what the game is tracking, how many people are in the game, what those players can DO, whether vehicles are there, can new players just drop in and drop out. There’s too many variables to give an accurate picture, but at a guess no. Based on how i’d code these kind of things (and without setting up a bandwidth monitor to get some decent figures) you’re essentially sending back and forth either very, very complicated text strings or you’re doing something called Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) both of which are much lower bandwidth applications than streaming video etc… Because all the things like the map and player models are stored locally you only have to tell each client where each thing on the map is and let the local game fill in the rest.
cc_star | 31/12/2009 12:08
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OK, so you need a connection of either 1.5/5mbps to use the service, but where does it say it rinses the total bandwidth 100% of the time? Nowhere that I’ve ever seen. The 5mbps is also the required figure for Xbox’s instant on 1080p HD movie streaming – so perhaps that’s the magic figure for HD quality images (although low bit rates have a dramatic impact on movies, but very little on gaming.
Raen | 31/12/2009 12:21
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That’s very true. A quick search shows me that ‘The Final Destination’ as 1080p DivX rip is 2.5GB or about 2500MB. The film is also 81 minutes long according to Wiki so that gives around 30MB a minute or 526KB a second. Assuming that OnLive is amazing and has 25% better performance than DivX. That gives 394KB a second. So if you play a game for a 3 hour session (around my average when I do sit down) that’s 394×60x60×3 meaning you use 4,255,200KB for a 3 hour session or 4GB per session. This isn’t a stand against OnLive (I think it could be amazing), just about some realities.
cc_star | 31/12/2009 12:39
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I’m about the same, 3 hrs a session… my usage cap is currently 80GB and I game about twice every 3 days, which works out my actual download download cap… my non-gaming usage is roughly 5gig/month and by the time this is ready to launch my usage cap will have been raised (like it does every year) or I can buy a 5gig bundle for £5 on top of my £19.99 subscription.
I’m not sure what other people usage caps are but there’s no reason they can’t switch to Be, o2, Plus.net or any other specialist professional broadband companies which are more generous than BT, Sky & the other non-specialist providers who give you ‘free’ broadband if you buy a tin of beans from them
Raen | 31/12/2009 12:44
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Well even if it comes out at DivX quality with no improvement (which we know there is) you’d be using 59GB based on current usage which includes your net browsing. That spare 20GB would be useful for a title launch
cc_star | 31/12/2009 12:55
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I think the quality would be lower than a 720p DivX, he seems to mention that bitrate is far less important in gaming image quality than it is in movies, so the the bitrate (and subsequently the amount of data transferred) could be far less with no perceived difference in image quality
SeaBeorn | 30/12/2009 20:52
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It seems great but i guess it will all be down to the costs for the consumer and how well it will work in production.
A question for me is will the games be on their servers forever or will they suddenly remove a game that i have bought when they think they dont get enough money from it.
cc_star | 30/12/2009 20:55
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He did say storage isn’t an issue, the game will be taking up a few gig of HDD space on a server… and HDD space is cheap as chips (in fact much cheaper going by prices at my local chippie)
SeaBeorn | 31/12/2009 00:51
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Yes but it builds up fast if they store all games. But if they never remove something it will be great because you can go and pick up some old game whenever you want.
Raen | 31/12/2009 12:07
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Ok lets see. Assume the average PC game install is around 10GB (this is just an assumption I could be way off). A 2TB disk is about £140 if you buy it at consumer pricing, which obviously they won’t be. So assume they get about a 15% discount on that because they’re buying lots and they’re buying direct from the manufacturer. So that’s £119 per drive. Now let’s say they want to start with 10,000 titles, that’s more than enough to keep everyone happy. With a 10GB install you can fit 200 per 2TB disk, meaning that they need 50 disks to store 200 titles. So 50 disks at £119 is £5,950. Say they charge the same as WoW (£8.99 a month) that comes out at less than 700 subscribers to pay for the storage cost within a month. Of course that’s 700 per data centre, but that’s still very achievable.
cc_star | 31/12/2009 12:16
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They lease the hardware anyway, so as long as revenue exceed costs it doesn’t matter if they need more storage
Looking at the vid and the Q&A at the end, they’ve calculated that the server leasing, 10×10Gbit streams with infrastructure providers, the cost of their custom encoding & streaming chips and cost of the actual console is more than covered by subscriptions… if more users connect, they simply lease more stuff there really is no limit to the scalability of the service.
iNsAnE_gAmInG | 30/12/2009 21:24
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20GB in a day???
I wish. My internet would be more like 4 days for 20GB (no exaggeration).
This whole concept is intriguing but not as useful or especially convenient in my view.
That guy who was talking everyone through it seemed like a very grumpy and generally not nice person.
Michael | 30/12/2009 21:33
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Good grief, I can’t be arsed watching a video about this stuff. Especially not one that’s 18 days long or however long it is. How ironic that they can’t compress this into about 3 seconds worth of pertinent information. Fail.
Someone wake me up when this actually launches, as it does sound fab…
bunimomike | 30/12/2009 23:18
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cc_star’s enthusiasm will keep us all posted. A summary of the video could be “the future of gaming is here but it’s going quite well without OnLive so maybe it won’t happen. However, it does look rather enticing.”
Covers all angles with that one, eh?
DJ Judas | 31/12/2009 01:00
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I agree that onLive is a landmark step in the right direction, but I believe that despite. the claims of it being lag free, it simply can’t be.
My roots lye in PC gaming and I notice localised input lag caused by. Vsync when the frame output is much higher than the screen refresh rate, this delay is far smaller than I can imagine is possible with anything done remotely.
I shall have to use the service to make a decision obviously, but I havn’t got my hopes up.
cc_star | 31/12/2009 12:19
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Its not lag free… but their model supports lag at a level which is lower than human perception, I just hope my exchange is upgraded to ADSL2+ by the time this launches because I can only get 4.5mbps out of the current upto 8meg service
DJ Judas | 31/12/2009 17:13
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This is what I was referring to, the localised lag I can notice is extremely acute, its also similar to players who claim to be able to not game at <30 fps when human perception is supposed to be around 25. Generally speaking this is because of inconsistencies in the fps and this is what is noticeable. The same might hold true for lag.