GDC: David Perry's OnLive-style service

By Tom Bramwell Published 26 March, 2009

"The OnLive news has forced my hand."

Acclaim's chief creative officer David Perry has said that he plans to launch a games-on-demand service a bit like OnLive, and was originally going to show it off at E3.

Speaking to VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi, Perry said: "I was going to reveal it at [E3], but the OnLive news has forced my hand."

OnLive, of course, claims that it will offer 720p, 60fps games over the internet to PC, Mac or "microconsole" owners without any appreciable lag or loss of picture quality.

Announced at GDC, the service - fronted by entrepreneur Steve Perlman and former Eidos man Mike McGarvey - has apparently been in "stealth development" for seven years and has caught the imaginations of gamers and industry-watchers alike, earning more column inches around the world than virtually anything else going on in San Francisco.

Perry, however, has not been working on his thing for seven years. According to VentureBeat, it's just him and a couple of Dutch technologists at the moment, and after filing some patents he hopes to raise venture capital and hire more programmers.

Interestingly, VentureBeat does record that Perry wants to do a deal with a major ISP, and this could be a significant move, as boxes hosted at a service provider won't suffer as many lag issues as those hosted in a datacenter.

Perry also reportedly said that his service will work on any machine with a broadband connection, and won't require an OnLive-style 1MB download. All of which is splitting hairs though: until either service is proven in the wild, you'd do well to be sceptical.

Look out for our analysis of the OnLive announcement, compression and infrastructure claims very soon.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000. Follow him on Twitter.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (27) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • lambtron #1 3 years ago

    This guy is a gasbag.

  • kangarootoo #2 3 years ago

    Any thin client service that has the internet somewhere in its framework makes me feel cautious. Thin clients aren't new, but they are almost always raun over a controlled and carefully scaled network. The internet is hugely unpredictable, especially at the customer household end of the pipe. Sometimes my crappy 2mb broadband runs at full speed, and sometimes it drops to a third (if some pesky student is torrenting episodes of Dexter up the street from me, perhaps). How would etiher of these services cope with that sort of drop?

  • byronicman #3 3 years ago

    Bugger. I was going to do one of these too, definitely.

  • rotmm #4 3 years ago

    @byronicman,

    I was thinking about it before you.

    My big idea was getting porn websites to host the servers for free, as they truly understand how to manage bandwidth, but also it could pay for itself as they could advertise their films during level loads.

    Long term, they would sponser new games, such as Zelda does Anal, DP Space, Jizz on my FEAR and potentially Gaylo 3 and Gayzone2 could become reality.

  • midnight_walker #5 3 years ago

    Onlive? Yeah, er... I had the idea first though, me and err... that guy, hey you're with me, right, dutch guy? "Huh? Yeah, shure, I'm with you man"

  • Malek86 #6 3 years ago

    "Perry also reportedly said that his service will work on any machine with a broadband connection, and won't require an OnLive-style 1MB download."

    Yeah, I'm definitely trusting this guy.

  • Gambit1977 #7 3 years ago

    Does he still wear those ridiculous bandanas?

    Get's me how Perry is still a gaming 'celeb', after all, his games aren't all that...

  • miiiguel #8 3 years ago

    Everyone woke up to Live Arcade kinda gaming and want a piece of it, and for these games this sort of services should work.

  • metalangel #9 3 years ago

    Is this Dave Perry the British gaming celeb or Dave Perry of Shiny "I can't believe it, you finished Stunt Copter!" Entertainment?

  • BillPoon #10 3 years ago

    "Does he still wear those ridiculous bandanas? "

    Isn't this "shiny" Dave Perry?

  • Eoin #11 3 years ago

    Nice to hear he's saving us the horrendous pain of a 1MB download.

  • anomagnus #12 3 years ago

    how many dave perry's are there?

    i picture a legion of pompous windbags, powering themselves through their own self importance

  • TheMoonRat #13 3 years ago

    Aladdin on the Mega Drive before that was ace. Earthworm Jim too!

  • Venkman90 #14 3 years ago

    Sounds like Perrys is him and 2 guys in a shed...

  • solidSnake04 #15 3 years ago

    @rotmm
    man you're funny lol

  • TOOTR #16 3 years ago

    @rotmm 'Jiizz on my FEAR' is as random as its hilarious :) I truly LOL'd

    RE: 'Interestingly, VentureBeat does record that Perry wants to do a deal with a major ISP, and this could be a significant move, as boxes hosted at a service provider won't suffer as many lag issues as those hosted in a datacenter. '

    umm...a service provider would still need a 'datacenter' to store its 'boxes'. the lag issues will be due to
    a) how near those 'boxes' are to the end customers
    b) how 'big' those boxes are : ports, processing etc
    c) the contention ratio or how many other customers are gaming at the same time and if other non-gamers are using the same bandwidth at the same time
    d) the technology (ADSL2+ , ethernet) and the transmission medium - copper, radio waves, Fiber to the home

    Using a major ISP would limit your customer base although you may indeed have more control over quality of service etc in those areas.

    I agree with many others - be very interesting to see this but its only going to happen in 'Da Future'. That said, I am right behind it and I thought of it too. And so did my wife.

  • Gambit1977 #17 3 years ago

    So there's 2 perrys? I always thought the dude on gamesmaster was the 'shiny' perry! Doh!!!

    God, imagine if there were 2 Peter Molyneux's (Molyneees? Molynays? come on, what's the plural??)

  • TheMoonRat #18 3 years ago

    twats

    Sorry, I actually like Peter M, but couldn't resist the easy joke :)

  • Gambit1977 #19 3 years ago

    haha excellent :D

    I don't mind his games, it's his Microsoft affiliation/paid love-ins, that do my head in.

  • PiranhaUK #20 3 years ago

    His idea is entirely feasible especially with an ISP like Virgin. They already have local data centres that supply the ondemand films to people over cable and they manage to stream un interrupted HD.

  • miiiguel #21 3 years ago

    "I don't mind his games, it's his Microsoft affiliation/paid love-ins, that do my head in. "
    Well, you seem to be right about both, he's supposed to be paid by MS as Lionhead is an MS company, hence affiliation and paid suits just fine.

  • f01re #22 3 years ago

    Yes there's two Dave Perrys (Perries ?) :

    There's shiny *David* Perry who's a gas bag twat. We call him Bad Dave Perry.
    [link url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Perry_(game_developer)
    ]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Perry...[/link]

    Then there's *Dave* Perry who's a harmless twat. We call him Good Dave perry.
    [link url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Perry
    ]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Perry
    [/link]

  • Fab4 #23 3 years ago

    Dutch technologists ftmfw!

  • Sutekh #24 3 years ago

    Forced him to do what? Talk up some more crap about a service that doesn't currently exist and might not ever? Cos, damn, I'm juiced up for that.

  • Kaspar #25 3 years ago

    I believe Dave's also working on some big secret MMO thingy. I want everyone to know, whenever he finally announces it, that I had the same idea too. Only, you know, i was going to do it BETTER. So there.


  • shamblemonkee #26 3 years ago

    Feck, I had it in my diary to announce my remote game server, dumb client thingy on Monday... maybe that RBS guy will give me some money to develop it with whatever random Computer Science students i can find staring at the servers in UWE.... it'll definitely work! my other development, the flying car, is going to take off this year too for reals!!

  • jose_furtado #27 3 years ago

    Apparently is true, I heard that some people have tried it already!