hazelam | 31/12/2009 10:11
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3850 TSA Points | Member since: Feb 2009

seems to work ok, and i chose my words carefully there.
seems to because all i’ve seen so far is videos, until i get my hands on it and try it personally then i can’t say for certain how well it works, and then there’s the issue of locality.
some areas have better networks than others, and some don’t have any broadband.
and what if everybody’s using this, can the network infrastructure handle that much data at the same time?
isps are already limiting people’s connections if they download too much, i can definitely see this falling foul of that, downloading a video is one thing, you download it once then watch it, but this will be a constant stream of video for as long as you’re playing the game, and for many people that will be hours at a time.
and despite some people’s assertions, even the best isp goes down sometimes.
if on live is all you have then, well then you better get a book out and start reading.
i could see this being good for mmos and other online games where you have to connect to play anyway, but most games i would prefer a physical copy that i can play whenever.
this is a good option but i can’t see it completely replacing the traditional console business any time soon, not until there’s 100% broadband coverage and the networks are outage proof, and that is a long way off.
at least with downloadable games you get a copy that cannot be taken away from you, say with on live or any other service like that, what if you like a game that nobody else does, are they going to keep that game on their servers for one person?
and they seem very US centric right now, how much support are they planning to provide outside the us?
with their thousand mile limit they can’t just have servers in the us like many online services do.
they’ll have to set up server centres worldwide, when even companies like sony are reluctant to provide servers for their mmos in europe where they don’t have the thousand mile limit, and the myriad of different providers on live will have to deal with for a region like europe if they plan to use their multi provider routing plan, so i don’t expect a start up company like this to provide much, if any, service outside the us for some time.
and i don’t know that it would interest me that much even if they did, call me a luddite but i still like to hold a disc in my hand when i pay money for a game.
all these systems seem to be heading in the direction of you not actually owning anything, they hold it all and you have to pay them whenever you want to use it, not something i’m that keen on.

and if this did totally replace the own your own hardware market, not just this service, but this and others like it, then where is the new hardware going to come from?
if they’re only selling a few hundred cards for these servers instead of the, i don’t know how many but more than that i bet, are they going to keep spending the millions developing new cards to try to outdo the opposing card manufacturers?
are intel, amd and ibm going to continue spending billions developing new chips? well they might because businesses will still need on site computing.
but they wont need new graphics hardware.

like i said, could be great for mmos and the like, means everybody gets the best experience, and nobody can hack the game, but for most gaming applications i’ll stick with my expensive hardware and discs that are in my house and i don’t have to pay anybody to play, except british gas of course for the electricity