News Onlive set for June 17th US launch

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2010/03/11/onlive-set-for-june-17th-us-launch/1

 

So, the new DRM is a monthly fee to access your games? PASS!

 

The monthly fee is for conection to the OnLive network. Game purchases or rentals are extra. You will only get access to trailers and/or demos included in the base fee. I'm guessing they've done the maths and the research, but I'm not convinced they'll get large numbers of players sign up.

 

Not really convinced by this, even if we assume that Internet speed will be optimal. Let's say that subscription plus a game like BFBC2 is £10 a month. And I decide to play that for at least 2 years, my total spending will be £240. That's not really something you call cost effective. A gtx 260 (what I'm using now) + bfbc2 is less than £240. so why pay more for something that requires third party redirection to gaming server, which will increase ping even if Internet conditions are optimal

 

So have they given any indication of the minimum bandwidth requirements for this to work effectively?

 

I want this to fail hard.
Taking gaming out of the hands and control of enthusiasts and making it a paid subscription service is not a paradigm I want to see popularised one bit.

If services like OnLive became the new norm you could say goodbye to mods, originality, quality, the enthusiast hardware market - pretty much everything many of the people who post on bit-tech hold dear in their gaming hobby.

As I see it OnLive directly opposes everything we nerds and enthusiasts stand for.
Hell, OnLive deserves an even deeper level of hell than console gaming.

Do not want.
[/melodramatic]

 

I pretty much is a console, isn't it? I don't see it as a replacement for PC gaming any more than consoles are, anyway. It's just an alternative.

 

It's an alternative, but it's a worse one. They want us to pay online subscription fees, internet fees and buy the games?! Servers go down, it WILL happen, you can't play. They decide to remove a game, you can't play. This seems like a truly epic way of getting gamers to hand over money for absolutely nothing in return.

I hope it fails completely and utterly. I think anyone that values their money at more than a promise of being able to play a game, should feel the same.

 

It's not only us enthusiasts who want to see this fail.

I can't see any of my console fan boy friends accepting the idea of a video game not being 'directly' processed at home by the console hardware they love.

How can PC gamers and consoles gamers brag about how much memory or cpu clock their favorite console has if it no longer matters?

 

@Zurechial = your point is failing hard, not onlive.

as a gaming or hardware community, surely we should applaud and encourage such innovation, change is good, even with its success, the enthusiast hardware market would surely survive, because simply put, onlive is not enthusiast hardware or for that market. its simply an extention of the console (IMO) aimed at low-budget pc users.

the enthusiasts will still build a big, original pc, modded, watercooled, with all the best hardware because they want to, like to and could possibly get a more purpose built machine with better quality than a streaming service like onlive. if you enjoy building a pc that can mop the floor with crysis, why the hell would you buy onlive? and why the hell would onlive try and target that audience in the first place?! they simply wont.

tl;dr? onlive is for low budget gamers who desire high res gaming on latest titles. not enthusiasts who can all ready purchase and experience it.

 

^^^^ wot he said. No longer will you pyhsically own a game, either in a box or as a download on your hard drive.

 

Sooo... the enthusiast hardware market will survive if OnLive becomes popular with budget PC owners? Who do you think stumps up the cash for all the R&D graphics card makers do and who allow the small batches of the ridiculous 5970 and GTX295s to turn a profit whilst not being over £700? It's the 4350 and the 5750 card buyers just as much if not more so than the 5870 and 5850 buyers.

 

When this reaches the UK it will be amusing. Thanks to traffic shaping and dreadful broadband connections, people will be unable to play the games they are paying for until 11pm when the throttling backs off. I can't even stream video until gone 10pm most evenings.

I'll stick with Steam, thanks all the same.

 

Except that, for a market like the enthusiast PC one to exist and survive, we need a decent mainstream market behind us. Hypothetically, if OnLive (or the streaming gaming concept more generally) were a phenomenal success and took the mainstream by storm, killing off every other console and the mainstream 'conventional' PC gaming market, do you really think game studios would continue making retail box / downloadable versions of games for a few thousand geeks who want the hardcore experience? No. They would focus exclusively on the streaming market where the money is - there would simply not be a value proposition in catering to the retail box / download crowd.

Same goes for hardware. With a streaming model, you only need a lightweight video processor to decode and display the streaming experience. No need for a chunky GPU in your system. And if the mainstream has no need for chunky GPUs, do you think Nvidia and AMD will continue to push forward with innovation? High end GPUs are halo products which are only economical with a mass market of lower end products underneath. Take that away and you can kiss goodbye to any prospect of a Radeon 6870 next year. A wholesale shift to streaming gaming would force Nvidia and AMD to focus instead on producing chips for OnLive servers, with no DVI output, no HDMI, no Displayport, and integrated hardware to encode and stream video. Heck, if I were OnLive I'd be pushing for a one board homogenous product including CPU, GPU, RAM, sound, video encoding, streaming and networking hardware all on one PCB.

Anyway, this is all academic because I expect OnLive will fail hard. The round trip from controller to server and back again will introduce far too much input lag for any serious gaming; people are unlikely to stand for a mandatory £10 a month flat charge which doesn't include access to games; and they'll be crippled by the capital expense of hardware.

My prediction - after 8 years in the making, the people behind this have invested a lot of money, time and effort. They take the product around the world showcasing it in a cloak of smoke and mirrors, shouting about how it's the next big thing in gaming while demoing it in carfully controlled conditions that don't reflect real world network performance. They float OnLive on a stock market, capitalise on their massive hype machine to drive a vastly inflated valuation, and extract a fat profit by cashing in their own shares. 2 years later OnLive is dead.

 

I know that I would never pay that much for that online service (+games). I know that half the time it would be terrible; I have enough trouble on this internet connection watching a 360p video on youtube, let alone all the extra bandwidth involved required for such a service.

It would be cool, though, but it is way overpriced for not getting any games included.

 

It's not really about whether or not they are targeting at us enthusiasts.

The problem is that this OnLive may possibly start off a damning trend.

If successful, in the future, the only way for anyone to play the latest games may be via the cloud to play (rent) games because all developers and game publishers decide they are only releasing via the controlling cloud method.

 

Worse will be when you get "Cloud Exclusive" games. First they started off as computer exclusives, then moved on to mixed, then console exclusives, then there will be console/cloud mix, and in the end there will be cloud exclusive games, meaning no more games will be left. Computers will be made only for rendering video and working.

 

Seems like I am the only one who thinks this could work. Lets have a look on what it does and what others do.

Monthly subscription. Xbox live does it. PSN does it and a whole load of online games do it. So why not Onlive?

Buy games online. Xbox does it. Pplaystation does it, steam does it and many many more do it as well.

There is also the good part of tht you are always able to play the newest games without the need to upgrade your PC or buy the newest console.
The only problem i see is the massive amount of bandwidth people need to play. But with internet speed steady rising that wont be a problem for long

 

This is nothing more than a 21st century arcade in my opinion....

 

Yeah, but inflation has gotton hold of my 10 pence pieces and turned them into £5 notes!