Xbox not worried about Gaikai, OnLive

By Robert Purchese Published 28 October, 2009

Something for "longer term", says Microsoft.

Microsoft reckons we'll be waiting a while before streaming services like Gaikai and OnLive are the norm. The good old DVD-plus-DLC model, said European Xbox Live boss Jerry Johnson, will continue for "the foreseeable future".

"Streaming technology is something that the industry is betting on longer term," he told a BAFTA audience at the London Games Conference, reported by TechRadar (via VG247). "Right now I don't believe that technology can scale out against the experience we can offer on a local machine."

"The technology will continue to improve. As an industry we'll have to accept that and move with it - but I don't think it's on an accelerated timeline for the foreseeable future."

Cloud services like Gaikai and OnLive use 'clouds' of computers to power games that you can control remotely over the internet. This does away with the need to keep up with the PC and perhaps console hardware rat-race - hence Microsoft's interest.

We delved into David Perry's Gaikai - now in public beta - earlier this year. OnLive, a more balls-out, gaming-focused platform, is also open for the public to test.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (11) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • rotmm #1 2 years ago

    Possibly because thinks such as a few seconds buffering for a movie is acceptable, but the potential latency issues for action, racing and fighting games would be a killer?

  • madjim #2 2 years ago

    I will always prefer local. What happens if someone wants to play a game in a remote area with no Internet? What if the Internet fails when I am playing my single-player adventure that has no need whatsoever for online access? Why should gaming become more and more dependable by unnecessary factors?

  • Fab4 #3 2 years ago

    Well you already have game ruining latency issues when using XBL thanks to the fact you are running games off Joe Blog's crappy internet connection instead of having dedicated servers. XBl used to be marketed as a 'broadband' service...I wish they would do some fucking checks to ensure it is.

  • rotmm #4 2 years ago

    @Fab4,

    That's true to an extent. However, titles played over XBL and PSN differ because most of the games have very well thought out client side prediction models, so that even with poor network perfomance it is possible to have a decent game.

    Neither of the server side models will have this, so latencies, packet drops, etc will have a far larger impact on gameplay.

  • Fab4 #5 2 years ago

    One of the biggest FPS on XBL/PSN is CoD MW, it has a server side hit detection and its quite obvious. However, hit detection aside, running game servers on a player's network is open to abuse and stupidity.

    Abuse when the host deliberately throttles the connection to gain an advantage (no latency prediction modelling will help you there), and stupidity when they are either running their 360 on a wireless connection up in their attic, maxing out the retransmissions, or their spouse/partner/brother/sister/etc are downloading porn torrents/streaming on another computer on their network. Or they simple dont have a connection fat enough to handle hosting MP games but are somehow chosen to be host by lame-ass matchmaking.

    In summary, you are expecting dedicated server performance from an unspecified, usually under-provisioned, and completely un-policed network.

  • dither #6 2 years ago

    CoD 4:MW has client side hit detection, Fab4.

  • GamesProgrammer Verified Games Team Programmer, Eutechnyx Ltd. #7 2 years ago

    Im confused when they were asked if they were threatened my Blu Ray they said no cos the future was all download, and now if there asked if there threatened by these online services there not cos its gonna be disk based with supporting dlc.

    Which is it MS

  • Xerx3s #8 2 years ago

    "TBH it seems a bit of a contradiction by msoft to say that the worlds ready for instant 1080p streaming yet the broadband infastructure is not in place for game streaming to stake its place in the market. also i have no doubt xbox LIVE will end up as a cloud service eventually with no need for the console."

    Not at all, it's one thing to stream optimised static content, it's another to have an input, dynamically calculate the response, dynamically optimise the output and then stream that back again. Quite frankly, I doubt that this stuff will materialise at all. It's already quite hard to get decent ping games, let alone the whole game running on the server. The infrastructure just isn't there and there is not much that they can do about it.

    Even the optimised small-scale lab demo's show a big response delay that just won't work.

  • Markusdragon #9 2 years ago

    I struggle to stream normal quality YouTube videos sometimes. The internet really isn't going to be ready for several hundred million unique HD video streams to be clogging up the system anytime soon.

  • Fab4 #10 2 years ago

    @Dither, no its not.

    From 402's Blog, during the beta testing period of CoD4, on the subject of host optimisation:

    "The removal of laggy servers will inadvertently address lag related issues some of you have been reporting such as ‘wonky’ hit detection and others caused by it."


    [link url=http://www.fourzero two.com/?p=138
    ]http://www.fourzero two.com/?p=138
    [/link]

    Anyway, if you have played the game to any extent, you would notice many occasions were point blank targeting wouldnt even result in a hit register, which wouldnt be the case if it was client-side.

  • Widge #11 2 years ago

    Yes I totally agree with the above.