OnLive CEO Provides Details On Cloud Gaming 136
eldavojohn writes "OnLive is a new cloud gaming service that is in beta testing. While it might sound like nothing more than corporate buzzwords creeping over into the gaming world, a new video reveals how the CEO claims his service will work. Perlman explains OnLive's solution to the video game compression problem and talks about the '80 ms latency budget.' It's pretty interesting to listen to him figure out this budget and where the 'costs' come from. (Video only.) Now, this all hinges on the 'microconsole,' which — as he reveals at the beginning of the video — is so cheap they plan to give it away. We may also see it incorporated with TVs and other electronic devices. He goes on to talk about perceptual science and dealing with packet irregularities on the internet."
Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
Does it run on Linux? I mean I know this question is often used in jest, but I'm serious.
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Does it run on Linux? I mean I know this question is often used in jest, but I'm serious.
Yes. Did you RTFA?
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Yes. Did you RTFA?
New here? No-one reads articles on slashdot. Welcome to the "summary crowd".
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Does it run on Linux? I mean I know this question is often used in jest, but I'm serious.
If it does then next year will truly be the year of Linux on the desktop
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Having to swap between Linux and Windows between getting games working and playing games just made me resent Linux for being too much like my day job. I don't come home to fix my OS; I come home to use it, and that's where Windows has the upper hand (at least as a gaming OS).
This service, if it runs on Linux, will make Ballmer quite literally shit himself.
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Oh noes, Have you tried WINE lately? I haven't tried it with anything cutting edge, but it surprised me by Just Working for the older (~San Andreas era) Windows games that I've tried it with.
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Oh yes (Score:5, Insightful)
"is so cheap they plan to give it away"
Hey Perlman (if that is your real name): the dot-com bubble called. They want their failed business strategy back. Subsidise the hardware, sure, but don't give it away. That's just asking for financial disaster. Your business is risky enough as it is.
Re:Oh yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Shhh ... shut up. They might hear you.
I DO want a free box with Ethernet, wireless, HDMI, surround audio, USB (for wired controllers) and maybe Bluetooth (for the wireless ones) and with a CPU wih enough oomph to decode HD streamed video. If we manage to port XBMC on this ... :)
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a CPU wih enough oomph to decode HD streamed video
If they decode video in the CPU, they're doing it wrong.
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If they decode video in the CPU, they're doing it wrong.
Using hardware decoders is non-trivial. You can't just call one library and have access to accelerated video on old nvidia, new nvidia, old ati, new ati, and intel at the same time. By targeting the CPU itself they reach the maximum number of subscribers, including those with shitty integrated video which can't really accelerate anything.
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Using hardware decoders is non-trivial.
It's pretty trivial if you have control over the hardware. This particular thread is about the 'free' hardware they intend to distribute.
The microconsole is bound to contain a cheap, low powered CPU, and a mass market decoder chip.
Re:Oh yes (Score:5, Funny)
the dot-com bubble called. They want their failed business strategy back. Subsidise the hardware, sure, but don't give it away.
My mobile phone company must be crying into their balance sheet.
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Phone companies don't give away phones. You buy them as part of a contract. If that's what OnLive is doing, fine, but then they shouldn't say that the hardware is so cheap they can "give it away".
The razor-and-razorblades model doesn't work if you give away the razors for free.
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Phone companies don't give away phones. You buy them as part of a contract. If that's what OnLive is doing, fine, but then they shouldn't say that the hardware is so cheap they can "give it away".
Semantics. Plenty of marketing will express it as an airtime contract with a "free phone".
OnLive is the razor. The games are the razorblades, and you won't get those for free.
Not semantics (Score:2)
The difference is that with a mobile phone, they have some gaurentee of income because of the contract. The contract says "You agree to pay us this much a month for X months, or a single lump fee of Y should you cancel the contract." Ok well that means that if you keep your contract, they make money since you pay them for service each month. If you cancel, the fee is sufficient to cover the cost of the phone.
However if this is a situation of "Here's free hardware, you pay for games," that only works if I ha
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The difference is that with a mobile phone, they have some gaurentee of income because of the contract.
We don't yet know whether OnLive intends to give away microconsoles without a contract.
My first guess is that it will come free with a contract. Just as with a cable box or a satellite receiver.
Re:Oh yes (Score:5, Funny)
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Why not give it away? It's probably cheaper than the average cable TV box. Their real expenses are server-side, and need to be paid by gathering a large customer base. There's little to be gained by deterring potential customers by overcharging for a piece-of-crap streaming box.
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"is so cheap they plan to give it away"
Hey Perlman (if that is your real name): the dot-com bubble called. They want their failed business strategy back. Subsidise the hardware, sure, but don't give it away. That's just asking for financial disaster. Your business is risky enough as it is.
They're not really giving anything away. The hardware will be 'free', but you'll be paying a hefty subscription.
This isn't like the dot-com bubble's business model. This is like the cellphone business model.
Anyhow this isn't the problem with the concept. The problem is they think games at 80ms lag are fun. That's 80ms of input lag, that is, between moving the mouse and seeing it move, or clicking a button and seeing a shot - not just for other player's actions. 80ms sounds horrible to me.
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How is this any different from ISPs that give you a modem "free" with your subscription? Or Verizon putting down four figures to wire your house on the hope that they'll recoup it over a period of years? Or your cellphone company giving you a "free" phone with three year contract (or even on pay-as-you-go in Virgin Mobile USA's case)?
If you're paying $x per month as a steady revenue stream, it's not a big deal. This isn't the same as giving away CueCats and hoping people use it, this is a hardware-provided-
Wait... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Informative)
Your memory's faulty. The Phantom was essentially Steam or Xbox 360's version of Live before the infrastructure existed to support such a thing. It was still supposed to be a client-side games console. Server-side rendering is a different animal. A ridiculous animal, mind you, but a different animal none the less.
Funding (Score:1)
http://blog.seattlepi.com/techchron/archives/180603.asp [seattlepi.com]
http://blog.onlive.com/2009/09/29/onlive-closes-major-investment/ [onlive.com]
AT&T Media Holdings, Inc., Lauder Partners, Warner Bros., Autodesk and Maverick Capital.
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Warner Brothers are probably getting in there so that they can keep getting a cut of the money, even if people aren't playing their franchise games.
AT&T are probably in there because they can make a killing through the extra bandwidth people will need!
Other than that I've not heard of them (perhaps they're big in the US and not outside, or maybe they're some "behind the scenes" names who are big really but most people have just heard of the sub-companies).
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AT&T may also be getting in on it just in case Verizon was thinking about getting in on it. Kinda as a "just in case" thing. If for some reason Onlive isn't vaporware, AND they manage to get thier ISP back to a "pay-per-bit" model they would stand to make a killing on bandwidth charges. I could also see them implying to onlive customers that AT&T's pipes are better for the service than Verizon's.
What's the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Cablevision offers 100Mbps for $99/mo in the US. Comcast offers 50Mbps for $99/mo as well.
Comcast has more customers than there are people in Korea. They will achieve 80% DOCSIS 3 coverage by the end of 2009. Delivering "100Mbps" is as simple as updating a configuration file. The problem is that the contention ratio would be horrible.
Guess what, though? The contention ratio is
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You do realise that 700MB in 8 minutes is only about 13.5Mb or so right?
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Ya those are around the speeds I see on my cable connection. It is a little slower than that, it is technically a 10mbit cap but they are a bit generous with that so it really goes a little fast. I get an effective throughput to my computer of about 1.2 megabytes per second. That translates to a 700mb file in about 10 minutes. Not quite as fast, but not bad given that my connection is supposedly 1/10th the speed. Also, I seem to get that any time of day, and to anywhere that has sufficient bandwidth to supp
Ahh yes (Score:2)
Because our nations are so similar. Ok so you've got a nice cheap connection. May I ask how much you pay for your living arrangements? Also, how big is the place you live? For reference I pay about $850/month for my place. I don't rent, I own. That amount includes principal and interest on the loan, taxes, and association dues. For that I have a 167 square meter, 3 bedroom, condo. The condo grounds have a pool and jacuzzi for the use of the residents, as well as some nice grassy areas to sit and read and so
Don't do it man! (Score:4, Funny)
Gaming on Weed might sounds like fun with all them clouds but the reality is you'll wake up in your mid 30s, broke, with no life and wish you hadn't. Besides everyone knows your reaction time is better when you're sober.
We already have clouds gaming...MMORPGs (Score:4, Insightful)
Servers that scale: check. Resources brought online as needed: check. Software as a service: Check.
And that's what make MMORPGs SUCK in my book. I can't play on the train (unless I spend a lot on wireless broadband - it ain't cheap in Aus). I have to rely on servers being up. I don't have time for any of that. If I get an hour to play a game, it needs to be available then and there whenever and whereever I get a chance to play.
If I want online chat I'll socialise with real world friends and family. I even have a couple of backups (mobile phone and land line). If you think I'm a luddite keep in mind I was on Skype and MSN with my mother 2 nights ago (after going round and fixing the security on her wireless network). I know there are people who love these games - even to the point of neglecting "real" life, but I just can't get into a system where my pleasure is at some company's control. I don't want to play a game against a freakishly good 12 year old. I might be interested in a game against a real world friend but I don't want something that saps my time and requires friends interested in the same niche as me.
By all means diversify but can we please keep traditional on a cd/dvd games that don't require a cloud, or even a network?
Re:We already have clouds gaming...MMORPGs (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We already have clouds gaming...MMORPGs (Score:4, Insightful)
Hi, server, it's Rogerborg - I'm back online. Yeah, the thing is, while I was playing offline, I won the game, got all the loot and hit level infinity. Be a good chap and update the world state, would you?
What, you don't believe me? Dude, would my client lie to you? Seriously, don't be so paranoid.
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Sounds exactly like Diablo and it's multiplayer/open option.. it was diluted with hacks and cloning and such..
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I missed the part about him nuking all the other game companies that makes games on a traditional cd/dvd.
A market need that is profitable will be filled ( even some unprofitable ones)
Re:We already have clouds gaming...MMORPGs (Score:4, Insightful)
Servers that scale: check. Resources brought online as needed: check. Software as a service: Check.
And that's what make MMORPGs SUCK in my book.
Yet MMORPGs are a massive success. They fit in with the desires of millions, you're just not one of those millions.
I don't buy makeup. I don't boldly announce that the makeup industry can't possibly make money.
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You're missing the point. This isn't about the TYPE of games you play, it's about HOW you play them. The demos I've seen have been straightforward FPS and racing titles, not MMOs. These games can be single player or multiplayer - the idea is you can play PC games without having to buy a gaming PC. Yes it requires a network and yes it requires their service to be up, but that's not a big deal for most people.
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While I think the idea of onlive is a complete and utter hype wank like the phantom console, you either didn't read the article or the article doesn't cover what Onlive is about.
Onlive is a product designed to let you play any games, be it multiplayer or single player on very very low end hardware, all the computations are done remotely, you just need a client installed on your PC, laptop or possibly even console or set top box.
They have a mammoth render farm of machines and a custom build of the games, say
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You forgot how it's rubbish because the subscription fees for something like 5 years (the typicial lifespan of a console) would probably have to amount to at least the price of a decent console plus a few games each year, if they want to cover their costs. These huge gaming server rigs, bandwidth, power and game licenses don't come for free. Suppose 5 * 12 * $20, which would be $1200 already, which buys you a PS3 with 10 games. What I, as a consumer, would get in return, would be a 'gaming rig' that stops w
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But seriously, we all want games that cater to what we are looking for. Right now we have diversity enough to have something appeal to almost everyone. I don't see that changing for awhile.
Cloud Banking (Score:2)
... rhymes with Cloud Wanking.
The allure of ***Cloud*** (insert fireworks) surprises and doesn't surprise me. Seems like any tech concept you can put in simple allegorical terms that can be understood by the technically illiterate investors (and tech journalists at Wired) is a surefire recipe for success. Here... let me try:
"Mountain(TM) Computing! The Problem: computing resources are spread too thin across the enterprise. Solution: With Mountain(TM) computing we marshal them for access at the peak. Intel a
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The cost-benefit analysis (Score:2)
For those with short attention spans, the product is supposed to provide games by server-side rendering. The essential question is: on aggregate, is it cheaper for them to buy the game-rendering hardware and set up the network infrastructure and add their margin, than for the end user to simply go out and buy a games console outright? If 20% of their users want to play Crysis 2, and 80% want to play Peggle, the company needs to buy enough heavy-duty hardware for all of those people to play Crysis 2, and sti
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If 20% of their users want to play Crysis 2, and 80% want to play Peggle, the company needs to buy enough heavy-duty hardware for all of those people to play Crysis 2, and still offer the service at a price which will please people who want Peggle. I'm not sure that the maths will work.
Er, no they don't.
What's more, if 100% of their customers want to play Crysis 2, half on weekends, half on weekdays, then they only need to buy enough heavy-duty hardware for half the capacity. When a home console isn't being played, that's potential computing power being wasted.
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Until the next public holiday, when 100% of their customers try to play and either half of them can't, or all of them have a sucky experience. Still, at least that'll cause their paying customer base to reduce to the level that they can support, so I guess it's a self-solving problem.
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Until the next public holiday, when 100% of their customers try to play and either half of them can't, or all of them have a sucky experience.
It's up to them as service providers to work out the right scale. It will likely *never* be necessary to have enough grunt for every subscriber to be playing a top-end game simultanously.
In your example of a public holiday, for instance - OK, some people will spend the day playing Crysis when they would normally be working. Others will go to see friends/family and not play games at all. Things even out.
Yes, they'll need to predict peaks and provide for them. That's no different to any other service.
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I agree that my 100% figure is just as bullshit as your 50%. The salient point is that they have to[*] provide enough iron to cover the peak, while not bankrupting themselves at the mean or median level of usage. That's going to be a tricky proposition since unlike (e.g.) an MMO they won't know the peak/mean load per customer until they've got enough customers to start losing them through bad service.
[*] They don't have to, iff they don't mind hemorrhaging customers.
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That's what the beta's for.
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You don't need monstruosities unless you are deeply in love with diminishing returns.
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It's even less... My quad core with a Radeon 4850 and 4 GB of memory won't go over 270W at full load, playing at 1920x1200 and highest settings. On idle, it's 167w... And this is with a bad power supply, a 460w with less than 75% power efficiency.
As for parent poster, I agree... Crysis and other games would most likely be rendered at maximum 720p and low to medium settings, because any better quality would just be lost on the compression and people won't notice it. 4:3 will probably be rendered at 1280x1024
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Newsflash: most people would consider your 8800GT, Athlon X2 3800 with 4GB RAM a very high level machine.
Then there's all the people with laptops that have lots of CPU, lots of RAM, and a crummy graphics card.
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Unless you're running it on an iPod screen.
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I am playing Dead Space, Stalker, Pathologic, EVE, DoW and a few other games at max settings. Resolution is 1280x1024. If I notice any slowing down I turn settings down a bit until it's smooth again.
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WoW shadows hobble the latest systems, and have done since WotLK. They did something very bad with particle effects with that release.
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And thats why I think this is an absolutely retarded idea. Lets assume for a moment that they have a wizard on staff that has allowed them to workaround the United States' horrible broadband infrastructure and cause transmission latency times to exceed the speed of light over Joe Sixpacks 12mb/s comcrap connection. They claim the reason people are going to want this is because "they won't need to buy a multi-thousand dollar PC". What? I'm not even sure I could spend several thousand dollars on a gaming PC i
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I see this as being piped to a widescreen 720p TV at best, 17" monitor at 1280x1024 maybe.
OnLive does 'SD' or 'HD'. 'HD' is 720p. I'm guessing that SD is 640x480.
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Do they need to buy 1 machine for every person? Absolutely. If they don't, they run a risk.
If all their users play the big games simultaneously, they're doomed. I personally don't think they'll get that kind of peak. Some people like to play at weekends, some before dinner, some after their SO has gone to bed.
Likely they're going to charge $19.99 or $29.99/month for this.
Source? I'm guessing you have no idea what they're going to charge. We don't know whether they'll charge by the hour or by the month, whether you'll buy a package or an individual game, any of that. My guess is it'll be a combination of these.
Which leads me to another thought. With pricing,
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Of course they are. Unfortunately they can't guess when these people want to play. Any hiccups in the service are going to translate to very bad press on a new service. So if people have to wait in line to play a game it is going to be a rather bad thing for them.
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Why run 2 machines? Its going to suck if you buy 1000 machines for peggle and 1000 machines for crysis and 1500 people want to play crysis and 20 want to play peggle level games.
Since they're not going to ghost a machine to prep it for every player, i think their only logical choice is to install every game on every machine.
Clearly, you wouldn't "install" a game on any individual server.
You'd have the game files on a big fileserver (SAN, whatever). You'd have the same software on every single game server, and the supervisor node that assigns players to hardware would know the hardware specs of each server.
Then you'd use a best-fit algorithm to decide which is the most appropriate place to host the requested game. One server could host one game of Crysis, or 5 games of Bioshock, or 20 games of Peggle. Or 2 games of Bioshock and
multicast? (Score:1)
In the video, when he talks about spectators all watching one person (same stream), he says they would use "multicast within our datacenters". Well, I could see the point of using multicast up to the end-points through the whole path (which, at least in germany, sadly won't work, because providers here don't support it), but using it within the datacenters? How will that help 100.000 people watching the stream, you will still need to unicast it expensively to every single viewer from the border of the datac
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I dont see this working and scaling in any shape or form without special treatment from big providers. Hell, even youtube likes to slow down at some times of day, and youtube uses less bandwidth and crappiest resolution.
The timing issues seem kind of sketchy (Score:1)
Imagine some sort of cloud gaming future in like 2050 where vast swaths of game genres have been killed off by the lag inherent to the game systems, and people play nothing but slow paced adventure and puzzle games!
Clip length = proof of quality (Score:1)
latency is not the only problem that this will hit (Score:2)
latency is not the only problem that this will hit.
I see bandwidth as one big one as many people only have 1.5-3 meg download and can't get faster. also cable may not be much better just think about how much load this will put on a node if a block full of people all hit this at the same time.
also the need for a LOT of hardware at EACH data center (Hardware needs like 1 high end pc per user for a lot of the games + back end systems) and the they will need a lot of data centers all over the place to keep lag
The future of new graphics tech (Score:2)
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With no market for PC graphics cards or even for cards in new consoles then who pays ATI / Nvidia to continue developing new technology?
Firstly, the servers for cloud gaming services will need loads of GPUs, so demand for new graphics chips would not diminish.
Secondly, this isn't going to obsolete locally hosted gaming. Many people will still want to run ninja gaming rigs; many people will want to play on traditional consoles. Cloud gaming may poach some customers away from local gaming, and it may attract people who could never be bothered with the hassles of local gaming. But it won't kill local gaming.
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Also, many (if not most) people wont have the network capability to play cloud gaming. There are many days when my feed cant keep up with YouTube, and that's with dedicated ADSL. What about when I'm travelling or at a hotspot?
I want a standalone app for my pc that does this (Score:2)
It would be cool, if on the road, I could launch one of my games whereever I'm at (say a friends) and play my games. But instead of a service, I want to run the server myself.
There's streammygame.com for the pc (haven't tried it yet) but again it's a service and not standalone.
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[citation needed]
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probably because gaming is saturated in Korea. There are PC-rooms everywhere. I can walk to about a dozen in less than 10 minutes. They're very cheap, and people in Korea are social gamers. They don't stay home and game. They go out and do it with their friends. Also Korean PC games are free. Only microtransactions for vanity things, and the system requirements are often quite low on most of them which means you don't need an expensive PC even if you wanted to game at home. A lot of home users use wireless
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Yup.
Even a lot of western games don't get big here, because they cost money. Koreans are all too happy to enjoy their free games.
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I was IncognitoHFX on Dave's. I am banned for the rest of my life for god knows what.
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Mostly, yes, but as a counterpoint: Navy Field [navyfield.com] a WWII naval combat game. The technology is stone age - bitmaps, DirectX6, TCP - and it's poorly supported and run, but it just won't lie down and die.
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TCP
Hell yea, ICMP is the wave of the future
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Not all. I don't play the MMOs, my Korean isn't good enough, but I have a very infrequently updated blog where I walk people through how to sign up and play various games that don't require much Korean. There are some there that I enjoy. FPS, and MMOs lend themselves best to the whole vanity stuff. You can't break into the RTS market with a bomb because of Star Craft. I've found 1 or 2 Korean made RTS out there, but they're not currently running, they seem to be down for revamping. There is a decent scorche
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For Korean broadband standards, this isn't revolutionary.
They should be testing it on the lowest common denominator first. I doubt this system is going to work in the US, Canada or most Western countries. There simply isn't enough bandwidth for it yet (or most people are going to play with such a low resolution that its not even worth it).
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There will be PC/Mac clients? Browser plugins even? Why didn't you say so, all of a sudden I give a shit.
Word of advice: don't get blinded by the US market. They don't spend nearly as much on games as other parts of the world.. and they don't have the greatest broadband. Other than the fact that you're white, is there a reason why you're not rolling out in Korea first?
The simple answer is publicity. Aion has been out for close to a year with 7 million users outside the western world then while approaching a western release it hits the front page of Slashdot a handful of times. That's all it is.
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Re:Oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to roll out in a market you're familiar with first (your home market), and during that time, you can have people do research on other markets and line up all your local people and resources.
You don't want to just jump into an unfamiliar market right away, that leads to problems.
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There will be PC/Mac clients? Browser plugins even? Why didn't you say so, all of a sudden I give a shit.
They did say so, right from their first announcement.
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009
How to Deliver Online Gaming, Minus the Lag
OnLive CEO Steve Perlman explains how his cloud videogame service deals with real network conditions.
By Erica Naone
This March, a company called OnLive promised a gaming technology that seemed almost too good to be true. The company said it could deliver graphics-heavy video games over the Internet to any computer or to a miniconsole hooked to a television. This includes games such as the first-person shooter Crysis, which is normally be
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WinXP with Firefox 3.0 without NoScript. Yes, I'd expect that Slashdot editors would vet submissions to at least work on this very very common platform.
Wait, no, I don't expect the /. editors to do much of anything, now that you mention it.
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due to annoying sites like news.com.au that auto refresh (to increase ad impressions) a lot of people disable this "feature"
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Remember, very, very few people in the overall scheme of things run NoScript. By doing so, you're making a statement that you're ok with missing out on some things that other people get. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad, but you lose your right to bitch when you actively install something that blocks content that may o
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How does this work in broadband starved countries (Africa, Oceania) where we get chucked on 64kbps when we go over the limit?
It doesn't. It's not even offered. Next question?