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

No, its just video.

@Lutherian: Great post. I gather that some SFII blocks require timing to the exact frame. No biggie - it just means that particular kind of game isn't a good fit for this kind of service.

@Lutherian: And you know that because ...

@MyPointIs: maybe those people watched the talk and read the article, instead of guessing?

UKSlim - fair enough - I'd watched an interview that was cut down from the full presentation.

They do talk about their servers being special (not in the bus way I presume) and virtualization for lower end stuff.

Will be interesting to see how the costs pan out then.

@ukslim: And couldn't they lie and call it video when it isn't?

@MyPointIs: Of course they could. It would be a very detailed and intricate lie, and I can't see what it would gain them.

@ukslim: Time to get ahead of Dave Perry :)

This technology has larger potential in the home if you ask me, building one good gaming PC and being able to play on it in any other room sounds alright to me.

As for the rest, it may work one day, the idea is great but I just think that the technology isn't good enough yet for this to work well.

@ineptPercy - You can already do that: http://www.streammygame.com/smg/index.php

If you poke around YouTube, there's someone using it to play Crysis on an eeePC, streaming over WiFi.

I'm seriously getting the fear now.

Pretty soon someone is going to start talking about 'paradigm shifts' and 'gaming 2.0'.

I can almost hear the whalesong now!

There are only 2 things needed for this to really work:

Fibre to your doorstep
Quantum computing

Easy....

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/liv...

This is interesting.

Something like this will be the future.
Emphasis on future.

Watching the presentation I don't believe them. The PR guy is really good, but when presenting the service he laughed the same way he laughed when making a joke, like overcoming the the barrier of speed of light.

Will be interesting how they will excuse not delivering their promises. However they've probably got loads of patents.

Cloud computing is the future and this is the first device to actually show this working

Oh wait you really want to have to get up stick in disks well god. Personally its good anyone who wants this to fail will see a games market crash.

Everybody wants this to work. However, few people are living in Dreamland, where it seems to work flawlessly.

I haven't read all the posts yet, and I have always thought this wouldn't work well, but are we really suggesting they would usehuge banks of individual PC to do this? Wouldn't they be running VMWare (or similar virtualization software/environment) on some supercomputing Linux/Unix (or even Windows) servers, with some custom video/display drivers for the individual OS (presumably some flavor of Windows) instances?

I mean, wouldn't this be the obvious route to go?

I've got to say, this guy needs to think a bit more broadly. If you look at the whole idea of OnLive with today's technology and real world issues (ISPs etc..) it does look like it could struggle but you've got to think of it disconnected from that. Things will change in the technologies this uses, in the business model ISPs work around. Maybe OnLive will fail, but it has put its marker down and things WILL change and move towards this kind of thing. Maybe not by the end of the year like OnLive would want but within the next 5 years. I've put my thoughts to this article in http://www.studiosonic.net/?p=202

"I mean, wouldn't this be the obvious route to go?"

They're talking about running the latest games at 720p, before streaming them to your home, don't think a VMware session is going to cut it. You'd be hard pressed to play a modern game on your own computer using virtualisation (they can run like crap), never mind on a server hundreds of miles away.

"Oh wait you really want to have to get up stick in disks well god. Personally its good anyone who wants this to fail will see a games market crash."

Don't be so ridiculous, this gimmick failing will not lead to a crash. I don't mind getting up to put a disc in, because at least then I know I own the disc, I'm not renting it from some company a hundred fucking miles away. I guarantee that if any publishers have signed up for this then it is because they can use it to lease games rather than sell them. No more second hand market, and they control the prices.

You got on reddit :)

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/...

To the guy that wrote the article; did you even watch the conference?
http://gdc.gamespot.com/video/6206692/gd...

It seems to me that every issue you brought up is answered.

You say they would need to improve the way movies are handled dramatically and reduce latency dramatically etc.

Norm: 500ms latency
OnLive: 1ms latency

That FIVE HUNDRED times better. Is that not drastic enough for you?

You use the best examples of compression currently available to show it doesn't work. They state there version is vastly superior to that because the current methods think about compression in a linear way.

Is that not something completely different to what you used in your example?

If so then how can you use this outdated method to prove their whole new method, that you know absolutely nothing about, doesn't work?

Christs the guy even tells us he was at Apple when they frikin created the whole compression stuff so I think he knows a little something about it and maybe just maybe since then his team have figured out a way of actually doing things better. I mean it's not like that has been one of their major focuses for at least the last 7 years, with all the current issues in mind and what they need to make it work with gaming, now is it.

You say the system doesn't work and yet using your outdated methods you stream a game at SD resoultion and normal speed, that anyone other than technophiles would be happy with, and there are far more general consumers out there than those who worry about 720p etc, so tell me how exactly does it not work when your outdated example using far inferior compression etc already does?

I'm not saying everything they say is the word of God but you seem to be pointing out issues they have already provided answers and solutions to.

I think you mistakenly assume this service is designed for people like you, when it's not. Just in the same way Wii is probably not designed for people like you, and it's the biggest selling console of this generation and the fastest selling console of all time.

The era of the nerd is over and it's time for gaming to move into the mainstream.

Maybe you could try that too and stop thinking that if the service doesn't do exactly what the most geeky of technology whoring nerds expect from it then it simply can't and doesn't work.

Wow Freeload it's a good thing you pointed out that the people selling the product say it really works and is much better than anything else before. Imagine how foolish the rest of us must feel having not noticed that bit of the presentation!

"issues they have already provided answers and solutions to."

Have they? Them saying they've solved problems with compression and latency is all well and good, but there are no details. I find it strange that people are so willing to accept this on the basis of some PR babble and a demo in a controlled environment.

The real test will be the public beta, if that ever actually happens.

Christ!

You gotta trust somebody some ******* time!

I mean we can all be sensible and realize that it's not going to be as perfect as it sounds but we can all also be sensible and realize that it must ******* exist in some form that is not that far off what they are saying.

I mean they have us signing up for a public beta for something that simply cannot work.

Get ******* real man!

I for one am completely confident they can do the SD stuff at least based on everything I have seen and read so far and all the other sites impressions and the demo and the answers to the questions about potential problems that they gave and the guys history of creating successful defining products and services.

I mean if we are just going to ignore everything and doubt everything then we might as well claim we have never sent a ******* rocket out our atmosphere.

I mean I have certainly never been on one or seen one leave the atmosphere with my own eyes. Have you?

Then clearly it's all bullshit just because I didn't invent it and know nothing about it and don't understand it.

Oh wait...Maybe it's all just the biggest and most elaborate April Fools in history.

@Baranga: Again, why would they create something like this if it doesn't work? Do you really think they fooled all those companies? Do you really think this is a scam, while the world is watching them?

Yes because it very often works. Scams involving some dazzling impressive promises are par for the course in economic downturns when everyone are desperate for the Next Thing that actually will make them rich again. Much like the "cold fusion" physicists or the "human cloning" doctor in Korea, this house of cards will come crashing down as soon as the guys can cash the VC checks and vanish to Cayman Islands.

@Freeload: Norm: 500ms latency
OnLive: 1ms latency

That FIVE HUNDRED times better. Is that not drastic enough for you?

Reminds me about the Dawn developers who promised they had "negative ping code" if you took their math at face value. Face it, you ONLY get that low latency in a LAN, NOT across multiple switches on the internet. Heck I get 40-50 ms ping across the 10 jumps to one of the most popular Norwegian online newspapers, and that is considering that ping packets are small and have PRIORITY on the network.

What is drastic is that people like you actually SWALLOW the snake oil and claim it tastes good!

You gotta trust somebody some ******* time!

Not when they make outlandish claims you don't.

I mean we can all be sensible and realize that it's not going to be as perfect as it sounds but we can all also be sensible and realize that it must ******* exist in some form that is not that far off what they are saying.

I for one am completely confident they can do the SD stuff

That is not 'not far off'. Are you actually suggesting that you'd pay for a service that gives you the latest games in stunning SD quality, rather than just buying a console or computer that can do hi-def properly? And that still doesn't eliminate the problems with input lag or huge server farms pumping out more heat than the sun.

I mean if we are just going to ignore everything and doubt everything then we might as well claim we have never sent a ******* rocket out our atmosphere.

Now you're just being silly.

Then clearly it's all bullshit just because I didn't invent it and know nothing about it and don't understand it.

You need to apply some logic and critical thinking. These people are claiming to have groundbreaking technology that is far in advance of anything seen, yet they've given no details whatsoever. A demo is not proof.

I mean they have us signing up for a public beta for something that simply cannot work.

Gosh, nobody would ever do that! People are always completely honest and trustworthy.

I hear the first OnLive game is going to be a port of the Phantom version of Duke Nukem Forever.

Like I say,

No one should take everything as gospel, but if they are claiming 1ms when the norm is 500, even if you doubt that then it would be ridiculous to think it isn't significantly better than what exists.

Maybe even enough to make their idea plausible and indeed real.

Wouldn't that be a shock!

But you are right.

When the beta rolls up we are all going to be playing on our Wii's and somehow we will have been tricked into believing this is a real beta of a service that is downloading games directly to our PCs etc.

It's all just a big scam!

I get it now.

When they say 1ms what they probably mean is 499ms.

When they say they spent the last 7 years developing the technology what they really mean is the spent the last 7 days setting up this hoax and the rest playing videogames on their Xbox 360 and dreaming up ways how to rip us all off.

It's all bullshit and we should just ignore them and continue to buy new PCs every year because it's ridiculous to even imagine it's possible to come up with better solutions than those that already exist.

In fact. It was impossible to ever move gaming beyond and oscilloscope and everything we have ever seen since then and all the improvements that have been made, that most people could never have imagined back then and would call you a liar if you told them, are in fact just all make belief.

No one can do anything that some dude on a website and his industry friends can't do or explain.

That would simply be impossible!

Guess what they said about Einstein when he came up with E=MC2...

Or Newton when he talked about gravity.

Or Stephen Hawkins when he talked about black holes.

Or Darwin when he talked about Evolution.

Or Steve Jobs when he first claimed iTunes and iPod were the future of music.

Or Iwata when he first showed the Wiimote and told us it would change everything.

It's all impossible because we never thought of it first and because when we see it we can't explain it and because there is nothing like it already, so it must be fake. It must be a lie. It simply cannot be possible for things to move forward and for people to come up with concepts that evolve those ideas that came before them.

Thank God not everyone is like you or all the other narrow minded small thinkers like you in here or else nothing would ever move forward because if you can't rationalize it or explain it then it simply can't be done.

When they talked about something like Phantom I didn't buy into that shit because it was clearly just a box and half assed idea and a load of bulltalk and that is all it ever was.

I think this is ever so slightly different.

Oh by the way.

Those 10 developers, which includes the likes of Ubisoft, EA and Take 2 etc, some of the largest publishers in the world. They have been duped and are developing all their games for a service that doesn't actually exist. In fact they never even showed their games running on the system at all.

That was actually just Derren Brown on his new Channel 4 show.

I think it's called ConLive.

You're coming unglued.

They have made some claims that are very unlikely based on currently available tech, it is therefore not unreasonable for us to ask for proof before we start declaring this the future of gaming, particularly when professionals who deal with this stuff on a daily basis are suggesting that maybe everything is not quite as it seems.

Maybe it is real, but you're acting like nobody has ever run a scam that fooled people with a fancy demo. I'm calling bullshit until they come up with a public demonstration that proves their claims, and that's a far more sensible position than your deranged ranting about how nobody believed in black holes and space travel.

The problem is not that you guys are being healthily cautious and analyzing what has been proposed taking into account everything that is known, everything that has been said, and everything that is already confirmed and real etc, such as the working demo, the signed on publishers, the hands on experience of all the attendees, the beta that is coming up, the confirmed launch time, the fact that the guys have a very solid and successful history creating defining products and services, the fact that they even have answers to all these questions people came up with, which clearly shows how much they have thought about this, and so much more.

You are simply saying it doesn't and will not work because it doesn't using any current methods you know of and because you and your friends cannot explain a way that it could work knowing what you know.

That is ******* retarded.

I don't know shit about the technology etc but I can say with 100% certainty that they have convinced me this is real more than you and all the other numpties on here have convinced me it simply cannot work.

You know...I designed the Wiimote 10 years before Nintendo ever showed it, and I have the sketches and ideas in various books etc to prove it. I remember my flatmate at the time telling me it simply couldn't work and no one would want it etc. Now you can believe me or you can doubt me but the Wiimote is here now regardless of what you think or what he thought and it is doing exactly what I claimed at the time and is changing things in exactly the way I claimed.

Just because he didn't believe it and didn't understand it, which is his problem, that doesn't mean I was lying or that it was fake etc.

It just mean he was a small minded fool that felt more comfortable believing it was fake because trying to understand it or believe that there were people who thought bigger than him was too much for his little ego to take.

End of.

There were people that claimed you couldn't make a car run on water (give or take) and provided all kinds of evidence to back up their opinion, even when at the very same time there were people making cars that ran on water (give or take).

Now we have cars that run on water (give or take).

It makes me wonder just how much faster we could have got there with less of the first kind or people and more of the second.

@Freeload
You can't blame people for being highly sceptical, me included. When new things are discovered it usually takes ages until their potential is realized. Look at radiation, it took about forty years to realize that you could harness the power of the atom to make efficient energy. look at mobile phones, people had sat phones for years before the technology was compressed enough to make it viable mass market. New technologies don't just magically appear with an 'economically viable' tag on them from day one. New technologies tend to progress over a number of years.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love Onlive to work because it sounds fantastic. But there is an old saying...'If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is'. Until we see a proper beta with thousands of peope connecting then you can't blame people for being sceptical.

Perlman also has a history.
He worked for General Magic (how appropriate!), which never delivered the content they promised (to the public). However their stock apparently doubled on the first day. The company doesn't exist anymore, but it was still profitable for a few people.
Plus he's in bed with Microsoft's Paul Allen, who certainly knows how to make more money out of a lot of money.
There are probably people behind this, who know they will never get problems with the SEC.

I don't say there aren't some great ideas and technological advances (and a whole lot of patents) behind this, but if this works we should all confess our sins before world's end.
For us non-profiting end-users, the best thing that can come out of it is something similar to this in the unforeseeable future. It would be kind of what Wolfenstein was to the FPSs.

^ WTF?

I think that 'those 10 developers' will be happy to get a a fat cheque (of your money, Freeload), for the PC versions of their games.

The money will be coming straight from your bank, it seems, regardless of whether the damn thing works well or not.

How are your 120fps 4D 32:9 (2xHDMI, Baranga) PS3 visuals at the moment?

Like I say,

I have no problem with people being sceptical.

I have a problem with this: "Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work" and the following 3 pages that supposedly prove how it cannot work when in fact all they do is show that the guy trying to prove it cannot work knows nothing beyond his tiny little bubble.

It's funny how the SD video example of Burnout that he used in his article designed to show "Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work" actually convinced me that it can in fact work more than pretty much anything else I have seen thus far. The fact is that he can do that with outdated technology and little knowledge of anything beyond the popular thinking and current methods etc has convinced me that it's blatantly obvious that if these guys have achieved even half of what they claim that their service already works.

I clicked his video and it ran perfectly, smoothly, looked perfectly good, didn't have any download time, and that was just him pissing around for a few minutes to create something to show me just how limited all this technology is and how the latency and stuff prevents it from working etc.

Now let's just imagine what we could have if someone with more intelligence, more knowledge, more money, more time, more resources more experience more vision and more imagination than him actually spent 7 years (and however many before that) trying to prove it could work...

@tonynibbles:
Agreed its inevitible -- even the harshest detractors (IMO) will agre that EVENTUALLY such a system will happen.

The question that has the naysayers going is when: 20 years from now, or 2?

You said 10 years ago, YouTube was pie-in-the-sky. Go back another 10, to 1989. If somebody announced then that they had a YouTube beta ready to roll within the year, they would have been talking pure, refined bullshit.

As the commenters (and the post) are pointing out, what they're talking about is a quantum leap above anything that is possible. They've essentially re-created (a) the internet (latency? Network traffic? No problem!), (b) HD-quality video production (per frame? They're gonna encode and transmit 720p 60 times a second? Lossles?), (c) production/ecconomic models (could this be done with a dedicated T10 line and a Supercomputer? Sure. So my supscription fee to the service is, what . . . $500,000?). As has already been said repeatedly, if they've truly licked all these things, then the company could simply license the service as middleware to MS/Sony/BritTelecom/etc. and make a few trillion dollars overnight. They're not. They don't like easy money?

All the detractors are saying how much they wish this would work. I wish ant-gravity would work, too, but when somebody claims to have a working antigravity generator and decides to use the technology to market a sneaker line rather than antigravity cars . . . something isn't right. And by "right", I mean believable.

I'd love to know when this tech will get to the point where it has the majority of this site's readers abandoning their consoles (and regular game purchases).

2015? 2020? 2050? I'll be 70 in 2050.

I think that this has great potential, but probably not for us lot for a while.

Also, we spend A LOT.

This has to become markedly better than the 360 & Wii (or their successors) to win. I'll exclude the PS3, as it's still too expensive to build.

Lets say that OnLive can actually deliver a service. Who owns the game if you decide to buy it instead of renting it? If I buy a game can I then give it away to a friend if I can't afford my internet anymore? Or maybe swap my game with a friend's game after I've completed it? Who owns the game or is there no difference from renting and buying? I'm confused :/

How are your 120fps 4D 32:9 (2xHDMI, Baranga) PS3 visuals at the moment?

Amazing, dude. It's like, whoa!

You gotta trust somebody some ******* time!

Is that so?
Well in that case, my name is prince Steve Ngumbu, from Nigeria. I have 10,000,000 (ten million) dollars in offshore bank accounts in need of a deposit of your entire life savings to access, which will then result in transfer of 10(ten) percent (1 million) dollars being forwarded to you. Please email all your bank details to me, I look forward to your correspondence!

I'm not going to comment on the whole article, but I think the argument that they couldn't have enough computing power to handle rendering the games is a bit of a stretch. They are not going to line their server racks with 2000 dollar home desktops with 4 gigs ram, a new Nvidia card, and a dual core. They are going to be running gaming specific servers with Quad SLI top of the line GPUs, 32 gigs ram, multiple quad cores and SCSI hard drives. Then they are going to split those into a number of virtual PCs for the game. That server alone I just mentioned can probably run 16 instances of GTA4 at 720P resolutions. When these servers are bought in bulk or simply rented (renting servers from datacenters is fairly common), they cost will not be too much. Say on average each subscriber plays GTA4 2 hours a day. That's 12 subscribers per day * 16 instances of GTA4 or 192 subscribers a month using that server. Say they're paying 20 bucks a month on average, that's 3840 dollars a month going toward that single server. I realize all the numbers I just gave are debatable, but I don't think they're unreasonable. I think nearly 4000 dollars a month can rent you some pretty amazing hardware. They get more subscribers/users, they just add more servers. If each server pays for itself plus the other costs/profit, then I don't see an issue.

I also have some Snake Oil you might be interested in.

@Sunyavadin

I'll send that money to you right away Prince Ngumbu.

Darthus,

They then have to encode all of the video for each user in realtime in 1ms.

Double all of that up, swapping the GPUs for video encoders of whichever magical flavour they choose. They better be making some serious money, or their beta will be tiny.

They're depending on the fact that many of the money people, and the decision making people just don't have a clue what this involves.

I'd love to see this working at my house, while another 5000 people are using it to play a fast paced game.

Slow games - no problem. It'd work right now.

@polaris70

I think the idea is that if you buy it then you just make that one of payment and in the long run it saves you a lot of money compared to if you were going to keep renting a game for example.

So you might pay $5 a week to rent or say $15 to buy. So if you know you are going to be playing the game a lot then it would make sense just to pay the $15 and get the game for as long as you are likely to ever play it.

Beyond that, in terms of being able to give it to others etc, since technically you now should own it outright...I have no clue.

^

'own it outright'

'Now we have cars that run on water'

'tard alert!

@Darthus
OnLive intends to launch this winter. Have you heard of any bulk buying from intel or AMD (we're talking thousands, possibly millions of CPU's). How about graphics cards, same again probably millions of them have been ordered from ATI, Nvidia, or have they? How about RAM, or are OnLive using matrix crystal solid state memory that they've just invented :) I don't buy into this, surely these bulk orders would have to be in place now, and we haven't heard a peep.

Why would you know about it?

LOL

@Polaris

Is this a thread to argue that the concept is impossible, or that it's possible, but they're just fleecing us and trying to run off with investor money?

I was arguing against the former. If you agree that it's possible that they could handle it hardware wise, then there's no need to argue that the former CEO of Eidos and inventor of Quicktime has devoted the last 7 years of his life to a way to get a bunch of investor money and then run to the bahamas.

About your 'tardation? You make it very, very clear.

Cars running on water is a great concept, but it's difficult to extract the hydrogen without using at least as much energy as you get back.

It's possibly a good way of moving pollution to the powerstation, though.