GDC: Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work Comments by Richard Leadbetter

Finally someone actually taking a skeptical outlook on this thing.

Thank you for finally setting all the yay-sayers here straight!

cloud computing is the future, everything is headed that way eventually. Whether this is pie in the sky or not, its sowing the seeds for the big players of Sony and MS to start building on in years to come, there are simply way to many advantages for them in terms of stopping piracy, second hand games, hardware races etc.

Give it 20 years, and we wont own anything anymore, it will all be subscription based living, heck even marriage will probably end up subscription based!

If this is the bleak monopolistic future for us all....then i don't want to subscribe!!

//still being stubbon about everything.

This article makes me sad :(

I really want this to succeed, the idea of never having to upgrade my PC again is brilliant.

This is the fusion reactor of gaming, if this works the world of games will be at peace forever.

It aint going to happen any time soon.

Nice article.

It all sounded like a scam from day one. Vapour-ware that will go the same way as the Phantom did.

But will someone of think about the console fanboys wars!

How will we keep this much loved mud-slinging practice alive?

This is a fascinating article and asks many of the same things I was asking yesterday in the other article's comment section. It sounds like this serive will be either very expensive to use or plagued with issues such that people will be getting an inferior experience. Are we to believe that OnLive are going to have an expensive PC set up and dedicated to each user and that they're not going to charge them for it?

Seems to me that if you're that bothered about paying £200 for a piece of hardware to play your games on every five years and the cost of those games themselves, you'd be better off buying the hardware second-hard and renting the games as it'll probably be cheaper in the long-run and deliver a much better experience. Just don't buy a second-hand Xbox 360 though... ;)

Nice article Richard! Someone talking sense! Even outside of the normal internet connection latency that people have been talking about - what about the input lag? It'll be rubbish!

Doing a deal with the ISP's would be the way forward. Virgin are already talking about 150Mb broadband in the not too distant future.

You haven't even gone into multiplayer games. With latency in single player games, how the hell would multiplayer games work?

@designerheadache

Until the cycle turns one half-turn and we go back to thick clients.

This is the guy who wrote a essay on how choppy the framerate was in the PS3 version of RE5. He also said the 360 version played better. After completing both versions I noticed no difference in frame rate and they both played the same.

then you must be blind or playing on some 12" SD TV.

@Moggsy

Yeah 150mb/s probably with a 20gig usage limit and a phorm subscription built in.

Most people were saying this in the other thread.
I've got a way for it to work that involves strapping virgins to a centrifuge and feeding priests to Satan, but I just can't get anyone to fund it.

I've got a way for it to work that involves strapping virgins to a centrifuge and feeding priests to Satan, but I just can't get anyone to fund it.

PM me. this i'll throw my life savings at

"You'll doubtless save money and the publishers will make more of it."

Nah, it won't let me to save money. They will keep the same prices for the games for ages while I buy used copies of games
a few month's old. Microsofts Live is a perfect example of how the prices stay the same for years.

@Coin Op - I've got both versions too and have played both *almost* to completion.

While the PS3 version's framerate is mostly fine and, thankfully, free from the screen tearing of the 360 version, it does feel noticeably chuggier to me when turning particularly and does suffer from more slowdown at various points in the game (usually where the game tears on the 360 by the way). Try spinning on the spot and you'll see the PS3 version judders slightly whereas it doesn't on the 360. After a while this does stop being an issue admittedly but the difference is there because v-sync is used on the PS3 version.

Richard Leadbetter showed a video from RE5 which CLEARLY shows the PS3 version's framerate was lower, that cannot be disputed, you clearly cannot sense those differences. I'm betting you never noticed the tearing in the 360 version either. ;)

Regarding the article: finally, blessed sanity.
Also, am I the only one concerned by how much worse it could potentially look compared with traditional setups? Years of technological evolution on both the software and hardware side of the industry wasted like this is simply appalling.

"This is the fusion reactor of gaming, if this works the world of games will be at peace forever."

More like the free energy scam of gaming. I can feel the injunction heading it's way from Phantom's, erm, OnLive's legal offices now...

This thing is getting enough attention that investors will be showering them with money.

That's probably what they aim to do, anyway.

From what I understand the games run at 60fps on the server side, but client side you're definitely not going to get that rate for now. Initial reports suggest that you get 30fps at most. Running the game at 60fps server side helps make the response time to the user input snappy though, obviously.

The real question for latency is whether or not you can keep it within that one frame. At 30 frames per second, that is 1/30th of a second latency you need. This amounts to 33ms. This isn't that different from getting online fighting games to work. What

I think it will work - not equally well for all games initially and most certainly not for a big number of users all over the world, but it is something that can start small and grow from there, especially as it seems investment on the side of the publishers / developers seems fairly small. And that always helps acceptance.

Most people I hear about this are nay-sayers. I think most sane people will start with the assumption that it can't work, and then try to find why onlive is different. ;) So far though, I'm getting the idea that it actually can work.

and this will work when cold fusion does.

I work with cloud stuff, and this is way out the league of what its initial expectations are.

@moggsy - "Doing a deal with the ISP's would be the way forward. Virgin are already talking about 150Mb broadband in the not too distant future."

Even if latency wasn't an issue and OnLive could deliver a smooth, perfect gaming experience at 720p @ 60 fps *all the time, without fail*, there's still the question of how much it would cost because each user would require their own expensive piece of PC or console hardware to run it on. That hardware would need constant maintenance and supervision to ensure it's working optimally and that would add further to the costs, costs which would have to be passed back down to the user on top of the cost of buying or renting the game itself. It doesn't sound like it will be cheap to me.

Aside from technical feasability... 720p is hardly high performance for a PC game. In fact, that's pretty low resolution.

That's an excellent article, probing the questions that have been going through my head since I first read about OnLive and thought "surely that's impossible".

And I hope it is impossible - I like to own games, in their boxes, on my shelf, thank you very much.

@robg
Until the cycle turns one half-turn and we go back to thick clients.

Yep, it does tend to see-saw all the time. I remember the hubbub when Sun announced that we'd all be using thin clients a long time ago and yet, here I sit waiting for my ant build to finish on my dell desktop. This is nothing new, they've just given an old concept a new name and trotted it out. Again.

But it's still infeasible.

I'm, personally, happier with my thick clients: if my net connection fails I can (for example) play Kings Bounty, if Live goes down I can continue to play offline.

With this? Naw. we'll have a "Service unavailable, please try again later" sign. We'll be completely dependant on their ability to keep this up and running at usable speeds. I don't have that kind of faith.

Exactly. Good article.


@Eraysor

"I really want this to succeed, the idea of never having to upgrade my PC again is brilliant."

And that, is why they will probably get their investment.

@Nithron - 720p is lower than the 1280x1024 resolutions PC games were using over a decade ago so I agree with you, it's not something that would interest me personally even it was working perfectly. I play PC games at 1680x1050 currently and hope to be moving to 1920x1080 shortly since my current machine is capable of it.

With the push for 1080p HDTVs, games played using this technology would end up looking awful blown up to 1920x1080 on large screen HDTVs anyway, especially the SD stuff, unless the compression algorithms are so superior that the image quality is indistinguishable from real-time 720p. I don't think that very likely in today's broadband infrastructure, certainly not in the UK.

Maybe in 10 years time when everyone has unlimited 250 Mbps connections and each piece of hardware is so advanced that it can handle parallel processing for a hundred users at a time with ease and compress 1080p video in less than 1ms and deliver it to people's home with no input lag then this technology could work for *all* games. As it is I think it'll have a lot of problems to overcome first and it'll be very expensive to use, which kind of counters the reasons for using it in the first place.

"Most people I hear about this are nay-sayers. I think most sane people will start with the assumption that it can't work, and then try to find why onlive is different. ;) So far though, I'm getting the idea that it actually can work."

Of course it can actually work. The technology is there. But, for it to work at the quality they are talking about and without huge connection-related problems? That's going to be very difficult.

Still, when the serice launches, we can expect some sort of free trial, right? In that case, I want to be there when everyone will be playing it at the same time. Want to see what happens.

this and the cold fusion "news" at the same day, why do we care about the financial crisis? Oh did you guys also read about the titaniumoxied (something) nanotubes that convert co2 to methane by sunlight? I'm going to quit working around late 2010 and move in at the Venus project. You just gotta keep being optimistic!

I doubt this will work any time soon, and it's less to do with the rich media side of things and more to do with the networking.

Even if it does, we wouldn't see it in the UK till at least 2050 at the rate BT are working. 21CN anyone?

"Occam's razor"...ffs, Jodie Foster has a lot to answer for.

I'm guessing they launch with Duke Nukem Forever as their first game... (if you know what I mean).

Strange how many who becomes experts on the technologi behind OnLive....I think people should just wait and see how it turns out..they have used 7 years to make this work.

What have you done lately?

The speed of light kills this, latency-wise. That's the indisputable fact here.

And more than anything I just can't see the value in it. If you think how well PC gaming (particularly online) works via current methods, neglidgable lag ~15/10ms and 100+ fps with everything client side on very moderately priced machines/connections.

Of course you could argue that they aren't targetting the core market etc, but then who are they really going to impress and intice here? I really can't see it.

@Coin-Op,

I agree with you. With Leadbetter pointing out that the framerate is more inconsistent, and with more dips, in the PS3 version of RE5, it means that nothing else he writes can ever be trusted again.

The real-time video encoding side is not that unrealistic. I've worked with live HD h.264 encoders and the latency (time to encode) was in the ~3ms range (Tandberg and Harmonic encoders) and at the last trade show I visited there were a lot of ~1ms encoders on show.

The input latency is the thing that kills this idea stone dead. Then the scalability issue comes along and pisses on its corpse.

This isn't a new idea either. I have also worked with a similar technology (G-Cluster) numerous times over the last decade. Even in a LAN environment (such as a hotel) the G-Cluster tech is not particularly suited to "twitch" games. I will admit that their most recent solutions are at least playable though, but that is in perfect conditions.

I can't see this working on Virgin. Most of us probably have the 10MB connection & in the evening if you dowload more than about 800MB they'll cut your bandwidth for you. So unless you want to play late at night or very early in the morning then there's no point.

@Eighthours;

1/ Maybe the guys behind this have found a parrallel dimension to send the information through, therefore, bypassing the speed of light and sending information in an instant.
2/ Or, multiplayer games will end up being 'spot the character model' as your character teleports around the map along with every other players character model in Modern Warfare 2.
So, which one of the above is more realistic ;)

Isn't it amazing how random nay-sayers somehow know better than those that worked 7 years to create OnLive?
Someone should hire these guys.

Even if this did work, wouldnt it just become another gaming format? I cant see Sony or MS letting their exclusives be played over OnLive. And seeing as MS has a hand in most Console->PC conversions, how would it all add up?

"Isn't it amazing how random nay-sayers somehow know better than those that worked 7 years to create OnLive?
Someone should hire these guys."

Say would you like to buy this amazing Phantom console? Some clever people worked on it for years so it must be great. Right?

Hi Baranga, I'm selling these fine leather jackets...

Maybe these people are aliens bringing us alien technology and they are able to brainwash Telecoms companies, to fund Fibre to every household; brainwash game developers and publishers, for buying into such a scheme which could potentially ruin them through lack of game sales; develop technologies that are far in advance of anything else that is being developed; and get us to pay 000s for it...

No deal lol

Phantom's devs were a bunch of idiots that only lost money and pushed back all the release dates.
OnLive has a scheduled beta already, that's a lot more than Phantom accomplished.

Isn't it amazing how random nay-sayers somehow know better than those that worked 7 years to create OnLive?
Someone should hire these guys.

Well, some of those "random naysayers" on this and other forums happen to be developers. And you don't have to be a developer to know that the speed of light kills this latency-wise, as it's really really obvious, frankly.

@polaris70

Well thats easy, all we need to do is use either send the information through black/wormholes or use quantum resonance to vibrate paired atoms across space there by transmitting the data instantaneouly. Of course we just need to get quantum level computing going but thats just a detail we can work out later.

On a serious note I was calling Bull on this when I heard it, current online gaming has trouble enough handling gaming when both users already have the game and system in thier homes as it is, and can you imagine trying to play a fighing game across this? they only got it working acceptably recently.