OnLive
The gaming arena is in constant flux with innovations on all fronts to produce games that are visually captivating and reach a large base of gamers. Having been a gamer for nearly two decades now, I remember the days of games arriving on 360K floppy disks to the more rigid 1.44MB 3.5″ floppy disks. Apart from the storage media, the graphics and sound capabilities evolved from CGA, EGA, to VGA and from the Adlib music only adapters to full speech with Sound Blaster.
With the arrival of CD-ROM to the gaming world, the games not only included some high quality graphics but also fully spoken dialogue that engrossed the gamer. The adventure genre really benefited by these advancements and performed exceptionally well.
One downside of the constant evolution of games are that for the average user, the latest and greatest games are the single piece of software that will attempt to utilize the full power and potential of their PC. This usually means that to play the latest game at a high rate would usually require newer hardware to go along with it. This need to constantly upgrade the PC to fully enjoy all of the advancements in the games is what converted me to a console gamer.
With consoles, gamers can once again return to not having to worry about the specification of the hardware but rather focus on the game content and what it has to offer. The Microsoft XBOX 360 and Sony Playstation 3 employ online networks that allow game developers to release demos of their games to entice customers to purchase the full game. I can’t speak much about the Nintendo Wii having not played with it.
However, not very game is accompanied with a demo to allow gamers to preview it before sinking the significant amount of money into a game that they might not like. Review sites do their job in guiding the buyer, but there’s nothing like playing the game for yourself to see how you like it. Game rentals fill this market need ideally and vendors such as Gamefly allow gamers to rent games to avoid spending money on games that they might not end up liking. Even for purchasing gamers, renting sometimes makes more sense since it allows the gamer to play the game through and then return the game in exchange for others in the queue. Unless a game has a large re-playability value, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay the premium price for a single play-through.
With the introduction of OnLive the gaming industry is ready for it’s next paradigm shift in the way gamers play games and most importantly interact with other gamers. OnLive brings the ever present concept of social networking to the gaming world is such a cohesive way that it aids rather than hinders in the whole gaming experience.
To qualify as a paradigm shift in the way gamers consume games, OnLive had to deliver something truly unique and ground breaking and their server-based game delivery to the PC browser and to your TV through the MicroConsole does just that. The games are housed entirely within OnLive’s servers and all processing is done there with hardware capable of scaling to meet the games need. The only requirement on the user’s side is a broadband Internet connection that will stream the game.
By off-loading the games hardware requirements to OnLive’s servers, the users PC or Mac doesn’t necessarily have the most expensive hardware available today and with the MicroConsole, the console gaming experience is preserved. Additionally by housing all of the gaming content on the servers, OnLive allows a variety of social networking functionality unforeseen before like the ability of users to be spectators on other ongoing games on the server. Additionally, gamers can now quickly join in ongoing games with multiplayer capabilities.
To truly appreciate OnLive’s offering, it is necessary to view the demo shown at GDC ‘09 below. Once seen, you will also agree that OnLive is poised to take gaming to a whole new level and spread it to an even larger mass.
OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 1
OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 2
OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 3
OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 4
Cheers
I remain entirely unconvinced by their controlled-setting demo, personally. Sure, screen-scraping is a great way to let you game on real hardware for cheap, but given the wide variety of “high speed” connections folks have, I’m waiting to see at least some reviewers being able to run it from their personal/work PCs over real-world connections.
Well Dave, beta testing begins this summer so we should all get to see how real Onlive is. I am an optimist here, and I think they will surprise everyone with how well the gaming system performs.
@Dave: I agree that the staged demo from 50 miles away (as stated in the video) doesn’t constitute a real world test. And I’m sure the system was overloaded by a large number of gamers.
Since the system is expected to be available in Winter 2009, I imagine that that OnLive is going to get some reviewers in front of this thing to give us some perspective. But the Internet latencies from around the US (is this worldwide accessible??) being what it is, I think the TRUE test will occur when the system does go live and the public starts to get into the act.
Either way, I’m going to be optimistic about this and hope for the best.
One thing I didn’t mention in the article is that I imagine this medium greatly lends itself to the prevention of piracy and so game publishers might spend more time/money getting their games onto this platform as opposed to out there fighting piracy. I imagine this doesn’t signal the end of the traditional medium of acquiring games as we know it today, but it sure will augment it.
@Onlivefans: Is the beta test going to be widespread or within some closed community? The more variety of people you have testing this with all sorts of Internet connections from all parts of the US, the better the general public will be able to gauge how real the technology truly is.