It’s not every day that a new product stands up and makes you do a double take, and having it announced this week makes it even more surprising. The Game Developers Conference is usually a quiet affair, with maybe a casual announcement or two about a console price drop or a new title in production. Today’s announcement has literally screwed up conventional wisdom and thrown it in the trashcan, in more ways than one.
The service is called OnLive, and it’s the product of seven years of development by incubator Rearden Studios and it’s founder Steve Pearlman. In fact, if you read Steve’s resumé you’ll find firms like Atari and Apple listed on there. Simply put, OnLive uses a cloud computing platform in order to provide a gaming experience to end users, regardless of the platform being used. The processing, interfacing and rendering is all managed on a backend server farm with the result streamed to a simple device that decodes the stream to display on the TV. For the PC and Mac, you don’t even need the device as all the work can be done on something as low-spec as a Macbook Air or even a netbook. All the grunt and horsepower you’d normally have in the latest console or high end gaming PC can now reside in a warehouse miles away from you, and you’d never need to worry about upgrading again. Sounds great, right?
To get into a bit more detail, the broadband connection suggested by the service is about 1.5mbps for standard 480p TV, while hi-def 720p will need a meatier 5mbps connection. This is great news for those of us huddled round the local exchanges, but for those out in the sticks the service might not run too well. It works by using a new video compression algorithm that inserts about a 1ms delay into shunting the video to it’s destination, but when you compare that to the 100ms delay that can be experienced when playing multiplayer games in Europe it quickly becomes tiny in comparison. There are five server clusters planned for when the service launches in the Summer once beta trials are complete, hopefully meaning that network latency is kept to a minimum. The box itself uses a micro-USB socket for power, with a paur of full-size USB sockets there for additional controllers or a mouse/keyboard combo, and has HDMI to squirt the signal up to your HD-ready TV. There’s also an optical SPDIF for hooking it up to audio gear as needed. Bluetooth is also in there for those of us who hate wires trailing everywhere. For those who want to play on PC or Mac, you’re looking at a 1MB web browser plugin before you can start shopping for games. Once you’ve picked and purchased a title, it’s on your screen in single digit seconds.
The OnLive Console: Boxing clever?
There’s a little bit of community stuff in there as well. As well as being able to spectate on other users playing their games, you’ll be able to build up a friends list for multiplayer action and also capture your own game sessions as brag videos, should you want to show off your skills. Since the video is captured in the cloud, it’s online and shareable instantly in all it’s high-quality glory. Big-name publishers like EA Games, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft and Atari are among those who are signed up to offer games on the system, although there won’t be any platform exclusives as there are with traditional consoles. 16 games were shown including the new Prince of Persia, Mirror’s Edge, Burnout: Paradise and Crysis. Even independent developer 2D Boy has ported the incredibly popular World of Goo to the platform. Transferring a PC game to the OnLive service apparently takes a couple of days, with an SDK available to make it easy.
So what’s the snag? As with any new service the price has to be right in order to make it appealing to the gamers. While the price of the box is said to be very cheap (we’re looking at the £50 to £100 mark) it’s the ongoing costs that are the great unknown with this one. It’s not clear if you’re going to be paying a subscription in the same way as Xbox Live, or if you’ll be renting or buying games. Trialling games will be available to give gamers an idea of what a title is like before picking it up, something that XBox Live supports but only if you download a demo copy to the console. Although the service might be cheap and easy to pick up and install, it could work out to be more expensive over time. There’s also the mindset of more traditional gamers that owning your own consoles and media is important. There are a lot of Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive consoles kicking around that get pulled out of the attic and dusted off every so often, and some gamers are rightly concerned that they’ll still be able to enjoy the games they buy today in five to ten years time. There’s also the variable effects of the network – with broadband providers having concerns over the use of peer-to-peer, BBC iPlayer (and Hulu in the States) and anything else that required a constant level of bandwidth there may be difficulty in getting broadband providers to agree to treat the service fairly.
That said, there’s definitely potential to the service. It might be that the service has legs initially, but I’d probably suggest that it would work incredibly well with Valve’s Steam service. There are also a handful of other ways I can think of that could make service uptake even better, but I’ll wait to see what other announcements come out of the GDC. I am curious though as to whether other applications of this cloud service have been thought of by Rearden Studios, and I’m sure other experts will pick up on them shortly. It’s an interesting development, and time will definitely tell if it proves to be a success. Till then, roll on summer!
Update: IGN have a video demo of the service here. Gametrailers have video interviews with Steve Pearlman here(part 1) and here (part 2)
Tags: cloud, Game Developers Conference, OnLive, streaming
SAY NO TO THE CLOUD!
Seriously, I can see the appeal to a certain extent and i admire them for coming up with a rather impressive idea, but that said, im one of those people from the ‘own your software’ camp. Having a remote copy of your games and never being able to have the software locally would totally kill it for me.
Steam? great concept and would do well if that idea was applied to this product, but i doubt that will happen.
Not for me.