Back in the depths of March 2009 Russell wrote a little bit on OnLive, the service that allows games to be streamed to your Mac, PC or TV, minus the expensive hardware:
Why’s that good? Hell, I don’t know. Titles that play regardless of my platform, titles accessible through my Mac or my television? Well, quite frankly, that slaps me giddy.
When OnLive was first mentioned the community was skeptical slapped giddy and there was much discussion over whether the technology existed to run multiple instances of games on servers, stream them over distance to users and maintain performance. Apparently we do have the technology as OnLive is launching today, at least for those in the US.
According to OnLive here’s how it works:
- Connect to OnLive with your TV, PC or Mac® or TV and play games instantly
- Games run over the Internet from state-of-the-art OnLive game data centers
- Controller action and game play are relayed up and down the Internet at blindingly fast speeds
- Enjoy instant game play on your PC, Mac® or TV. No high-end hardware required
And there you have it, no expensive hardware required, you just need something capable of accepting and displaying a stream at a decent frame rate; suddenly your iPad is a capable gaming machine.
I checked out the current crop of games for OnLive and none are particularly multiplayer, most are solid, singleplayer experiences, so ping won’t be so much of an issue. Streaming is fault tolerant, but I’m interested to see what OnLive deems a quality service, especially with twitchy multiplayers found in the CoD series.
Even more interesting is the idea that OnLive could stop cheating in games, particularly those users that install aimbots or gamehacks. With OnLive you don’t have access to where your game is running, so installing your own evil, game-ruining software is impossible.
Could OnLive bring about the console experience of reliability and simplicity for PC games or, as the RPS commenters think, will it burn, burn, burn?
This is why there’s no — nor *will* there be — PlayStation 4 or XBOX 3 now, despite thier 5 year cycles being up.
Oh, sure — they’ll *say* the graphics are so good now, there’s no need for a new hardware generation every 5 years now — they can squeeze another year or two out of a console.
That is, to put it nicely, so much balderdash & poppycock.
Or, as you Brits like to say: “Bullocks!” lol
Like all other apps, gaming, too, is moving to the cloud.
“OnLive” is but it’s first step — there’re other competing services waiting in the wings, watching.
Letting OL deplete *thier* energies & resources/money to iron out any performance & billing bumps, then when the market’s mature, in they’ll jump.