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)

PlayStation 3: Nice box, hefty price

Starting off, we have a pile of stuff around the Playstation 3. There’s been murmurings around a price cut for months now, with developers crying out for one and Sony steadfastly refusing to do anything about it. With this there’s a bit of history – at launch the Playstation 3 wasn’t a must have accessory. People weren’t queueing up to buy it as they had all picked up Xbox 360s and were having fun with them. The only real pitch Sony had was to position it as a cheap Blu-ray player as well as a games console and pick up some purchases from the enthusiast AV/home cinema crowd. Moving forward, now they’ve got a stack of top quality games on the platform but there’s still nothing there to help persuade players to switch from the Xbox or Wii. In fact, there’s a handful of reasons why players like myself aren’t running out there and buying one.

• That £300 price tag. It doesn’t matter if the build quality is better or the technology’s superior if there’s two other consoles out there for significantly less dough. With the 360 for £170 and the Wii at £180, I’m really struggling to justify parting with three hundred notes for Sony’s box. I don’t have a blu-ray player and my TV only does 720P, so I’m in no rush to upgrade to hi-def film and will probably only do so when my upscaling DVD player breaks.
• The friends list tie-in. On Xbox Live I’ve got all my friends listed there. I get alerts when they come online and get invites to multiplayer sessions through it. It’s all seamless, and it all ties in with my MSN/Windows Live neatly. If I move over to the PS3, I lose all that and have to rebuild it again. Coupled with the problem that most of my mates aren’t PS3 owners anyway and it means that most of my tine would be made up of solo play or multiplayer with some random teenager with Tourette’s.
• The lack of compelling exclusives. Most of the stuff I want to play is available on both platforms and where you have an exclusive deal on one you can usually find an equivalent title on another (think Gears of War, Killzone and Resistance: Fall of Man). There is stuff on there like Flower and Pixel Junk: Eden, but these are just downloadables and certainly not something I’d splash out a huge chunk of wedge just to play.

Now I might not be your typical Sony customer, but it’s just the way I read things at the moment. The only thing the PS3 has going for it at the moment is the technology. If it can hang in there for about another year, you’ll start to hear developers complaining of capping out on what the XBox 360 is capable of. If that starts to happen and you get simultaneous releases that have a huge difference in quality between versions on the two consoles, you might find people more willing to bite the bullet and migrate. Until then though, about all Sony can do is change the price and encourage more people to give the system a try.

The PhysX Card: Substituted with a Software API

The next thing I’m struggling to grapple with is the flavour of the month feature of doing physics work on the GPU. This has been kicking around ever since NVidia bought Ageia, a small company that specialised in making expansion cards and an accompanying API (called PhysX) purely to deal with physics based calculations. The idea was that effects could be made more realistic by performing more accurate collision modelling, cloth effects and so on. NVidia bought the tech, turned it into a software API and got it it run on their own graphics processors. They’ve now licensed the tech to Sony for use in the Playstation 3, meaning that developers can now use the GPU instead of one of the Cell cores for physics work. I’m still trying to work out why anyone would bother with this, as devs are still struggling to push the Cell to it’s maximum performance with current titles. Besides, most places seem to be using Havok for their middleware, so why trying to grapple with something else that’s not really needed? And wouldn’t it be more sensible for someone like Intel to pick this one up if it was really needed and cram it into their line of processors before shunting the frames off to the GPU for assembly and rendering? The whole thing feels like a tick-box feature without any real use and will probably be made redundant with CPU development over time, just like maths coprocessors.

Finally, this year’s conference seems to have a large chunk of it devoted to the legendary Casual Gamer. The general punditry goes that the Nintendo Wii is a casual gaming platform designed for casual gamers. As it’s shown that there is a market out there for casual gamers due to it’s astronomical sales, the logic follows that developers should be making games to target them. Now, without getting into the whole debate over what a casual gamer is (I’ll save that for another blogpost) are these people actually picking up many thirdparty titles to play on their console? I’d love to see some stats on this, as my gut feel (and I hope I’m wrong) is that most Wii owners are playing Wii Fit/Music/Sports, or a Mario, Sonic or Zelda game and not much else besides. My other wonder is how platforms like the DS or iPhone come into it – are these casual gamers trying something out, or hardcore gamers having a bit of a “game snack” during their free time? Again, I’d love to see some stats.

So, while the yearly developer gathering takes place it’ll be interesting to see what comes out. I also wonder what their hopes are for the year and what direction they’d like to see the industry head in. Till then, it’ll be gamers like ourselves who are peering in from outside, guessing at what’s going to happen next. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll work out if I fall into the Hardcore or Casual bracket.