News Onlive set for June 17th US launch

I'm interested to see if this does truly work especially in a realistic set-up. I for one will be very surprisedif it works well in this country, especially at any truly great leve of detail as my net connection gets flustered with iplayer HD at anytime bar the dark depths of night and youtube is slow most of time

PSN is still free for use and one of the reasons I like owning a PS3 as I'm not a fan of paying ontop of my net fees just to unlock the online gaming (no console war/flame intended just my IMHO).

Still here's hoping for a review on Bit-tech at somepoint if it takes off!

 

I'll be fine so long as I game outside of Virgin's ever expanding throttling zone. An hour of iPlayer HD and it throttles below playable so I expect the same from this if they can even cope with 1080p.

 

@ smc

Allegedly it needs about 1M/bs.

Take a look at this article on impressions of the Onlive beta: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=859&type=expert

Summarised: Customized low detail 1280*720 resolution in all games, significant input latency making FPS titles unplayable, all games and menus showing latency issues with mouse control, latency control issues not as noticeable when using a game pad, some games very playable, bandwidth needed a fairly constant 1Mb/s.

I should mention I'm slightly dubious about the article I linked to and summarised. While the author has an excellent reputation and I certainly believe he was using Onlive as he said I'm unsure as to why Onlive have allowed the article to remain available. It's very possible that Onlive have at the least approved it, which would suggest it's painting a rather flattering picture. Just a thought.

 

This.

Wow. Friendly way to start a discussion, kudos on making a great first impression.

I don't care who the service is aimed at - My issue is with the trends that a service like OnLive will promulgate, as others have pointed out.
If successful, it creates an appealing avenue for the big-name publishers who have proven time and again that they don't care what 'hardcore' gamers want - Nor do they have to, because the average moron with more money than sense will still go out an drop his €50 on an overpriced, underdeveloped cashcow title for their idiot-friendly console.

I'm not going to turn this into a discussion about consoles vs pc or mainstream vs elitism etc, I've done that often enough elsewhere on this forum, but this topic ties into it.
The dominance of the mainstream/console gaming market has arguably resulted in a decline in the quality of gaming (in favour of publishers making a quick buck from mass-market cashcows) even for those of us who don't buy into it, because developers and publishers are inclined to go where the money is, not where the artistry is.

By the very same token if OnLive is successful there will be a market shift towards it and away from those of us who don't want it.
Whether or not we are the target market for OnLive, it will affect us if it is successful, just as the success of modern consoles has affected PC gaming and the overall direction of the games industry.

Taking choice out of the hands of customers is never a good thing and anyone trying to claim that the existence of OnLive is offering extra choice is fooling themselves and falling for marketing rhetoric.

As always, I'm standing on a virtual soapbox in a forum, ranting impotently about a topic that matters to me, but as I said; I want OnLive to fail and fail hard.
It represents everything I take issue with in the modern games industry.

 

The big difference is that on OnLive you pay monthly before you can even access your games.

XBOX Live doesn't charge you monthly just to access your games.

You own your games. OnLive is only technically for renting games.

 

Ignoring the PC market for the moment (the cost of a gaming PC is debatable), basically the cost of just over 1.5 years of subscription to onlive = a console. Even if the quality of connections etc was perfect, who would do this? A console cycle lasts several years, so if you're gaming long term, you're buying 4 consoles, and any games you buy are even less substantial than digital distribution is now. With steam at least you can log on any PC and download for free unlimited times. With onlive you pay full price to have the right to play a game only if you are subscribed to a paid service. Ridiculous.

 

I bet the high street retailers are hoping it doesn't work out either. Otherwise you will see GAME renting store fronts only a meter in depth with a counter and only OnLive boxes on the wall them and EB etc etc will be sitting together talking about the good old days and drinking themselves into oblivion.

OnLive have said you can only be max 1000km from the datacentre that you are connecting to, I guess this is to improve performance but does this mean that they are not going to allow inter-country multiplayer or are they going to put fiber between their clusters, I would like to know how they are going to do it all.

 

Now that they've announced part of the pricing structure, i cant see it working, You're never going to own the game you're playing, you cant play it unless you're connected to the net, Console gamers wont buy it because they already have to buy games and xbox users pay for live access so they arent gaining anything. Pc Gamers wont buy into it because they wont be able to 'fiddle' with the games.

Then theres the server issue, its bound to fail at some point and nobody will be able to play, but they cant cancel the subscription to the service because they've bought loads of games and cant use them in any other way.

 

So now I get to buy may games and then pay a monthly sub to play them and I guess when I stop paying I lose my game... wow this is a great idea, for the seller.

 

yeah this really has no market it would seem, will be interesting to see what happens.

either way i can see a terminal in the home and games running on third party servers being in the far future of gaming, just not in this implementation or this decade.

 

I remember whatching an interesting demo of this online (while try to link it later) but the cost of games through onlive is set to be around 60% cheaper than RRP as they make their deals direct through game developers and cut out the middle man i.e. the publishers and again don't have to pay for packaging, shipping, advertising (Onlive will advertise through it's own ways when you log on) so for some it may not be as expensive as first thought but in my honest opinion, I can't see this working (internet latency requirements etc) and full heartedly hope it doesnt catch on.

 

Have they ever addressed how they plan to overcome latency problems? They've spoken a great deal about how they'll address bandwidth with compression etc. but if this is all done through one centralised server you'd have to live pretty close or you'll be noticing severe lag.

 

And here was me thinking this would be more like an appeal for casual gamers. They'll be installing from the same media as the retail or digital downloads, so it' s not a threat to PC gaming (far from it), but they're missing a trick - pay-per-play rather than purchasing games + subscription would make this a success, but paying £10-£15 a month just to get demos then have to buy the games too - what happens if you are unable to renew your subscription but you have paid-for content? do they keep that for you indefinitely? I don't think so.

I don't even buy from Steam, I like having my media where I can reach it. But then I still have VHS tapes in cupboards, vinyl in the garage and audio cassettes in boxes. I'm sure I've got a couple of programs & games on 3.5" floppy floating around somewhere. Whether or not this is the future of gaming remains to be seen, but the publishers & software houses want to control piracy, & this is potentially more secure (for them) than any DRM solution that relies upon the license purchasers being either scrupulously fair about what they install or not equipped to bypass their DRM controls.

 

But people pay a hell of a lot per month for Sky without ever getting to own what they watch!

Hey I own all the games I bought years and years ago, but they never get installed let alone played!

 

What seems to be the major flaw to me is everyone's favorite World of Warcraft. I question how the interaction between Blizzard server, OnLive server and Client would all work out, and how much people would be willing to pay for multiple monthly fees. There are hundreds of thousands of people who only play WoW and would ignore any service that does not provide it. The MMO market is only growing and is rapidly growing on the mainstream, love 'em or hate 'em MMOs are a huge boost for the PC gaming industry. Unless OnLive can host a large number of MMOs and make them all work smoothly I can't see this getting far.

And as many have said before, server availability will be a huge problem. The mainstream gamer wants to plug it in and have it work. If it doesn't always work, no one's going to try 'plugging in'. Seeing as many of these users will be people who can't be arsed to actually get a decent computer and actually install games you can just imagine how short their patience with technology probably is. Even when they can play if it's not consistently the same quality experience as one can get with a console then it won't last long.

 

There's not much 'replayability' in TV content like there is in video games anyway.

Most stuff on TV, you wouldn't really care whether or not you watch it more than once, or whether you own the content.

Also, if I see a movie on Sky that feel I really must own, I can go to the shop and buy it. Then it's mine to own for life. Nobody can tell me if or when I am allowed to watch my movie that I own, and I don't need to worry about whether my TV service or internet service allows me to watch my movie. I can watch my movie on my portable in the car if I want.

The ultimate question about Onlive is what would happen if it became successful. I'm not only fearing a future where we have OnLive-exclusive games, but where almost every AAA type of video game is cloud based. The problem is that we may no longer have any choices.

You may be totally happy to have a gaming future where nobody ever owns their games, they only rent or demo games for the time they are subscribing to OnLive.

 

where's warrior

 

That's my dose of neo-luddite for the year.

This will be huge, enjoy.

 

I can't see MMO's being offered this way. OnLive players will only be able to play with other OnLive players who are connected to the same data centre. This is likely to mean that a very large percentage of your guild mates will be uncontactable by the service (unless you have a guild where all the members live in the same city). OnLive will need to have their own WoW servers in their data centres, and then they'll need servers for the next MMO that comes along, and so-on. And that's assuming the MMO devs/publishers allow that to happen.

 

Looking forward, as new MMOs are released they will all have to deal with the issue of players. Games such as Warhammer: Age of Reckoning have shown us the difficulty of launching an MMO in the current gaming environment. The last thing a new game of this sort can afford is a fragmented playerbase due to services such as OnLive, but at the same time, the last thing they can afford is missing out on players who use OnLive exclusively. Assuming that devs/publishers will even allow this like you said, it would only work for games which are already well-established such as a WoW, but of course no game can live forever and by the time it's established enough to work with OnLive it will probably be losing players already. A vicious cycle, all of it.