With the Games Developers Conference under way in San Francisco, the press will be able to see future technologies that will be used for games(as well as interesting games design talks). One of the interesting new developments is a new digital distribution platform called ‘OnLive’.
I know there has been a whole host of digital distribution platform popping up to grab a piece of the PC gaming pie, but this one is markedly different. Its creator claims it will change the face of console gaming as well as PC gaming. IGN has a detailed write up about it and I quote:
When you load up the service and choose a game to play (I'll come back to the service's out-of-games features in a bit), it starts immediately. The game is housed and played on one of OnLive's servers, so there's never anything to download. Using an appropriate input device, be it a controller or mouse and keyboard, you'll then play the game as you would if it were installed on your local machine. Your inputs are read by the plugin (or the standalone device if you choose to go that route) and uploaded to the server. The server then plays the game just like it would if you were sitting at the machine, except that instead of outputting the video to a display, it gets compressed and streamed to your computer where you can see the action. Rinse and repeat 60 times per second.
No downloading the entire game and processing takes place on a server(instead of your local CPU). That's insane! And if you think this will be small games, you are wrong, we a talking about huge triple A games here.
A 1.5 mbps connection (which is usually what base-level DSL is rated at) is required for standard-definition video (480p), while a 5.0 mbps connection is required for HD (720p). The actual necessary speed is a tad less than advertised, so as long as your provider says you have these speeds, you should be OK.
Sigh okay. So we still have a ways to go. Don’t expect this service to work well with our ‘reliable’ internet service provider. But how cool is it that now you can run Crysis regardless of your machine. No requirements(apart from internet connection), it is all processed on a central server.
As for the MicroConsole itself (which, again, is optional), the device is give or take about the size of a PSP game box and maybe twice the height. In other words, it's pretty tiny for a gaming "console". It features two USB inputs (you can use a hub if you need more), a mini-USB port for power, optical audio output and HDMI video output. There's also Bluetooth support for voice or wireless joysticks, keyboards and mice. Obviously, if you want to use this thing with an older TV, you'll need to pony up for some conversion hardware, but OnLive stresses that the MicroConsole itself will be fairly cheap. We'd expect it to be no more than $100, and a $50 price tag is certainly not out of the question.
Apart from the cost of the hardware, the service will be more of a subscription based service, so expect it to take off slower than its free competitors. It of course has the whole social networking functionalities of having friends list bla bla.
A number of publishers have already signed on to have their games launch on the service, including EA, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Epic, Atari, Codemasters, Warner Bros. and Eidos. While we were able to play Crysis and Burnout Paradise and noted games like Grand Theft Auto IV on the intro screen, these titles may only be demo software for the time being as OnLive plans to launch with newly-released software when it goes live. We're hoping Crysis sticks around as some of us will finally be able to play it.
This service actually sounds so revolutionary its mind bending to figure out how they got the technology for this to work. I hope we can get more news about this service in GDC. While I’m a little disappointed about the broadband requirement(clearly falls out of most Malaysians connections), it is highly possible that this system will probably be in the US first. The tentative release for this platform is Winter 2009(beta is this summer). To close things off, here’s the video demo(and a video interview) for it:
This sounds like an insane and unworkable idea. It's basically trying to adopt the thin client idea for games, but even thin clients for business didn't work out so well. Keep in mind that whatever input you give the game needs to be sent up the pipe to the server farm, processed and then sent back to you before you can get even one frame updated. Imagine trying to use your mouse to look around in a shooter. Even under ideal conditions, it can't help but feel laggy.
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