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OnLive Remote Gaming Service Launches In June 316

Posted by Soulskill from the promises-coming-due dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "After eight years of development, remote gaming service OnLive is scheduled to roll out on June 17 for Windows and Mac. The company also announced its service pricing: users will need to pay $14.95 per month, which will allow them access to the service. However, the company did not disclose the price to rent or purchase games. 'It is partnering in this launch with publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The games will also include new releases like Mass Effect 2, Borderlands, Assassin’s Creed II, as well as a bunch of other titles. Perlman anticipates anywhere from a dozen to 25 titles to be available at launch time, and more after that, depending on how negotiations with other publishers proceed.'"
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OnLive Remote Gaming Service Launches In June More

OnLive Remote Gaming Service Launches In June

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  • Hmmm ... (Score:2, Informative)

    by WrongSizeGlass ( 838941 )
    The reviews on performance were mediocre to bad ... and some of those 'partners' don't exactly have the best customer service track record ... and only $14.95 a month you say?

    I wonder how long before one of those partners throws a tantrum and pulls the plug in one (or all) of its servers when it doesn't get what it wants?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by sonicmerlin ( 1505111 )

      What reviews of service? Stop spreading your garbage FUD. There were no reviews allowed due to the NDA for beta users.

      The only review I ever read was done by a guy who wasn't authorized to use the service, using a friend's account, and played from twice the recommended distance to one of the game servers.

      Half the time the servers refused to let him on because his lag was too high. And yet despite being 2000 miles away and being constantly warned of poor performance and lag by the servers, he *still*

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by WrongSizeGlass ( 838941 )

        What reviews of service? Stop spreading your garbage FUD. There were no reviews allowed due to the NDA for beta users.

        The only review I ever read was done by a guy who wasn't authorized to use the service, using a friend's account, and played from twice the recommended distance to one of the game servers.

        Half the time the servers refused to let him on because his lag was too high. And yet despite being 2000 miles away and being constantly warned of poor performance and lag by the servers, he *still* had a positive experience with several of the games.

        These beta testers [arstechnica.com] disagree with you. Not FUD, Fact.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by sonicmerlin ( 1505111 )
          I like how you reference a link, get modded up for it, but don't even bother to read the article yourself:

          We heard from many beta testers after our story went live, but few were willing to speak on the record... for the obvious reasons. One user did agree to give us his take on the service, provided we keep his anonymity.

          Good job buddy. Keep up the excellent sleuth work.

  • What a steal! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:14PM (#31432436)
    Zero control over my purchases? Zero re-sale value when I'm tired of a game? Zero incentive for publishers to discount their titles? Zero bandwidth & gaming ability remaining once I hit my cap? Zero ability to take my games with me once the company goes belly-up (and boy, will it ever...)? All for the low, low price of $15/mo? Sign me up!

    • Then cough up the $50 per and buy new releases. This is an alternative; you can rent them.

      It amazes me that people even bother reselling games. It's called disposable income for a reason. If you can't afford to dispose of it then don't spend it.

      That all being said, I'll continue to buy my games. I'm not interested in this service, but there is no need to bitch and whine and moan about it.

    • Re:What a steal! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sonicmerlin ( 1505111 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @08:42PM (#31433152)

      I don't think you understand that publishers have a much greater incentive to discount their titles just like they do on Valve's steam. You don't seem to realize that in retail the tail end of a game title's sales curve is completely leeched by used game companies like gamestop, who undercut retail prices by 50% and reap all the profits for essentially doing nothing.

      As people have seen with Steam, when the companies don't have to contend with Gamestop they can lower their prices to very low levels to stimulate sales, knowing that they won't simply be undercut by used game stores.

    • Zero control over my purchases? Zero re-sale value when I'm tired of a game? Zero incentive for publishers to discount their titles? Zero bandwidth & gaming ability remaining once I hit my cap? Zero ability to take my games with me once the company goes belly-up

      Welcome to the brave new future.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bnenning ( 58349 )

      At least the OnLive model is more honest than crap like UbiSoft's always-connected DRM. With OnLive it's clear that you own nothing and are just paying to rent games. With insane DRM you get to pay the higher cost of "buying" the game, and you still don't actually own anything.

      That said, I won't believe their service is usable for midrange or higher games until I see it in person.

    • You're missing the biggest point of onlive - they maintain the gaming machines for you. Instead of you having to upgrade your computer every few years, and having to live with a sub-par gaming machine towards the end of its effective life cycle, onlive's servers will be continually upgraded to keep up with the games.

      So now you can game on your netbook, your Mac, your TV or even your cellphone.

      There's inherent advantages to this approach - you don't have to worry about downloading/installing games, hardware

      • Re:Not the point of onlive (Score:4, Informative)

        by B1oodAnge1 ( 1485419 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @11:29PM (#31434180)

        Instead of you having to upgrade your computer every few years, and having to live with a sub-par gaming machine towards the end of its effective life cycle, onlive's servers will be continually upgraded to keep up with the games.

        You are assuming that the onlive experience will be better than a sub-par gaming machine. It won't be.
        A $600 desktop will easily be able to run crysis at a higher resolution and a higher frame rate, without the input lag.

  • Monthly charges AND per game (Score:5, Insightful)

    by twidarkling ( 1537077 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:18PM (#31432488)

    So I'm paying $15 a month so that I don't need to have a fancy computer to play all the latest games. Except I'm still paying for the games.

    So, say a $1000 computer will last me about four years. I'd save about $280 using this service, but I'd have to get all my games through them, I'd only be able to play when my Internet works (wait, are they Ubisoft in disguise?), and the quality of my experience isn't guaranteed to be as good as playing on a copy running off my own machine.

    You know what? I'll *pay* that $280, and gladly.

    • Re:Monthly charges AND per game (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Monkeedude1212 ( 1560403 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:38PM (#31432654) Journal

      Lets say you've got $1000 bucks to spend. Internet connection we'll say is ~$30 a month. Thats for decent gaming speeds @ home. In scenario A, you grab a $200 computer and your total billing becomes $45 a month - so ~18 months of gaming.In the other scenario, 18 months of internet connectivity is $540. That leaves you $460 for a new Rig. Not a whole lot to deck out your machine.

      Reversely, if you buy an 800$ machine, expecting it to last you 3 years, thats $800 + $540 so $1340 overall. If you buy a $200 machine, expecting to play for 3 years, thats $200 + 1620 so 1820 overall. Saving about 500 bucks. The only factors you as a user have to think about its how long you'll go between upgrades.

      This OnLive System appears to work well for those who want to game during summer vacation but Buckle down during the school year - in other words: Short spurts of gaming.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Mandelbrot-5 ( 471417 )

      Four years out of a 1k gaming rig? I'm a cheap bastard, and I still spend $400 a year to keep just above minimum specs for the new engines.

      • Four years out of a 1k gaming rig? I'm a cheap bastard, and I still spend $400 a year to keep just above minimum specs for the new engines.

        Really? My friend spend about $1000 bucks in 2005 or 2006 for a Quad Core from Intel and has upgraded the Ram Once and it's lasted him this whole time.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You're doing it wrong.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Haeleth ( 414428 )

        If you're paying $400/yr, you're not a cheap bastard. Sorry to shatter your world-view, but you really aren't.

        I haven't spent a penny on my computer since 2007, when I upgraded it to what was mid-range then -- and it still runs new games just fine.

        The simple fact of the matter is that most games have to run well on current-gen consoles, and current-gen consoles are stuck with 2005-vintage technology. So there's no reason to upgrade beyond a certain point, unless you absolutely have to play with every sing

        • "If you're paying $400/yr, you're not a cheap bastard. Sorry to shatter your world-view, but you really aren't."

          Agreed, who needs to spend $400 every year to keep up with games? Maybe if you throw in the price of the games I could easily see reaching $400 a year, but $400 on just hardware? Let's see, that's a new i7-920 [microcenter.com] and $200 left over for a decent motherboard and ram, so what are you going to buy next year? Ok, $400 for video card.... then what, new processor? Pretty sure the i7 920 wouldn't be o

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Wovel ( 964431 )

          But do you know it will run midrange better than OnLive?

      • My last major upgrade was in 2007. It wasn't super high-end; it's a Core 2 Duo E6600 and a Geforce 8800 GTS with a cheap motherboard (P5B-E) and okay RAM. Everything still runs more than acceptably. I've also overclocked the CPU and GPU moderately, which brings most new games past "more than acceptably" and up to "runs on High at 1920x1080 at more than 50 FPS". This is probably the longest I've had a PC last at this level of performance.

        What are you buying every year?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Microlith ( 54737 )

      are they Ubisoft in disguise

      They are what Ubisoft, EA, Activision, et. al. want the gaming world to become. No hard distribution channels, no consoles, no PCs, no DRM to fight with.

      You go, buy a box, pay a monthly fee for the service and for the games. They retain 100% control and can fuck with you at will, since you have no recourse. Now you can hack the game. Now you can get a killer deal on the predecessor to the latest HOT SEQUEL and find out it probably sucks (or is awesome, but who cares about -good g

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by sonicmerlin ( 1505111 )
        You're very jaded, aren't you? If you understood anything about the issues with resale in the retail channel, you'd understand that game publishers are disincentivized from discounting because they are constantly undercut by used game resellers. If you've ever used Steam you'd see how often publishers use massive discounts to spur sales of older games. Recently I remember a campaign for a $5 Bioshock when Bioshock 2 was being hyped.

        • Re:Monthly charges AND per game (Score:4, Interesting)

          by totally bogus dude ( 1040246 ) on Thursday March 11, 2010 @05:31AM (#31435770)

          You keep saying that and I'd really like to see where you get this information from, i.e. [citation needed].

          Buying video games is clearly discretionary (purely entertainment), which means people are going to make such purchases from discretionary income. Selling things second-hand gives people more discretionary spending ability. It seems highly unlikely that at least some portion of this wouldn't go back into buying new games. After all, if they have games to sell, they must have bought them new at some point, right?

          Gabe Newell seems to think that pricing isn't all that important. This is in regards to piracy, but it seems reasonable it would hold true for new games, as well: he's certainly not going to be discussing the second-hand market here. Video here [youtube.com] (statement at 5:25).

          Also, there seems to be an element of circular logic here: games have to be sold at high retail price because many people aren't willing to pay that and instead buy it second-hand (at a lower price). Presumably this leads to publishers increasing the retail price to make up for the "losses" from the second-hand market, leading even more people to resort to the second-hand market. Nice self-fulfilling prophecy.

          I don't think the cheap Steam sales demonstrate any kind of willingness on the part of publishers to lower their prices, given how new-release titles are still just as expensive on Steam (which, to the best of my knowledge, effectively prohibits re-sale). This only seems to happen for products that are effectively obsolete, and as a way to increase exposure for new products (e.g. Bioshock as you mentioned: what better way to get people interested in Bioshock 2 than to have them play Bioshock 1 just before its release?). This is more about the cost structure of digital distribution vs. retail distribution than anything else, i.e. it's actually feasible to sell a game for $5 and make money on it on Steam, whereas packaging and shipping a product and putting it on retail shelves for $5 just isn't going to happen. Retailers who have a large stock paid way more than $5 for it already and won't want to take a loss, and the margins on selling product at that price point would be too small for most publishers to want to bother with.

    • I'd have to get all my games through them, I'd only be able to play when my Internet works

      Not just any kind of Internet, either. At the moment, they're a requiring 5Mbps connection (they say they will also support a reduced-quality mode that runs on 1.5Mbps).

      Which also leads me to ask: how much traffic will this thing actually eat? And how likely would be a person who games reasonably often to run into their ISP's cap (where such are common)?

      • To add to the above - their current FAQ [onlive.com] just talks about "SD" and "HD", conveniently omitting what they mean by it. But Google remembers [74.125.155.132] the older version, which had it all spelled out:

        For HDTV resolution (720p60), OnLive needs 5 Mbps.

        So it's 1280×720. Which is kinda meh these days for PCs, when a 24" (1920x1200) can be had for so cheap. It's definitely not what I'd call "HD".

        • At least not in the same way your computer is. All video on your computer is sent losslessly, 4:4:4 to your monitor. Full colour resolution per pixel, no blocking of any kind, etc. Gives a very sharp image. This? Not so much. You aren't going to get great quality 720p video, even with the highest end codecs like H.264. It'll be ok, but plenty of artifacts (and that's at 30fps not 60). However they can't do H.264, even if they had infinite compression power, it takes a heavy hitter of a system to decompress,

  • Well good luck to them (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:21PM (#31432522)

    I just don't see this succeeding, especially after seeing the leaked preview article. The problem is that on top of the cost of the service, you have to have a good net connection. While it uses like 1mbps for the stream, you need more like a 10mbps connection to keep the latency low. Remember that you don't just have to take ping time in to account with data transfer, but the time it takes to transfer all the data. Ok well good connections cost more money and thus aren't so much the domain of the budget user which is their target user. I mean I've got a connection with low ping times and plenty of bandwidth, however I won't be buying since I also have a video card.

    Another problem is that because of the compression on the video stream, you are not going to get the highest quality video, no matter what the settings on the host computer are. Part of their selling point is that you get the max quality of new video cards on your current system. No, not really. Looking at the gameplay vids you get more like mid to lowish quality video. Fine, but that isn't nearly so expensive. $100 will get you a video card that will look as good or better than what was shown, and that is not nearly such a barrier for entry.

    Yet another problem is that their service requires you to be near one of their data centers, so that pings are low. Fair enough, latency can kill this, but that means their potential user base is less than it would be otherwise. There will be users who want the service and can't have it because their ping is too high. Some may even be near a data center physically, but too far Internet wise.

    Finally there's the ever present lag issue. While the test showed some kinds of games to be playable, the lag is there and was noticeable in relation to a native system.

    I just don't see this as having a big enough market. If they truly could deliver a gaming experience the same as owning a $1500-2000 system over low bandwidth net connections, sure. However they can't. They can (almost) deliver the experience of owning a $500 system with a $100 graphics card added on over a moderate bandwidth net connection to some areas.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by WrongSizeGlass ( 838941 )
      Back in Jan the performance didn't exactly get two thumbs up [arstechnica.com] even from actual beta testers [arstechnica.com] who complained about the lag issues.

      • Re:Well good luck to them (Score:4, Informative)

        by sonicmerlin ( 1505111 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @08:54PM (#31433250)

        Ars is citing the PC perspective article. That was the stupidest article to be citing, because the guy who wrote it wasn't authorized to use the beta, and was 2000 miles (twice the allowed 1000 mile maximum distance) from a game server. The service constantly warned him about huge lag issues and sometimes wouldn't even let him log on.

        The author of the ars article, Ben Kuchera, purposely never mentioned this and made some hand-waving comments about how he'd round up some beta users who had negative comments about the service. Seriously, he never did. The entire ars article was totally unprofessional, and the PC Per article was repeatedly debunked as being worthless.

        The fact that you're still spreading this FUD speaks to how you've already pre-judged the service and aren't interested in doing actual research or waiting for an unbiased and accurate review to find out what it might be like.

        • The reason why people aren't "doing actual research" is because OnLive doesn't allow it. They are being very locked down about the process. As such people have to get what they can get. If OnLive doesn't like it they are more than welcome to stop being dicks and open the service up to review services.

          However, I suspect they know it isn't that great and are hoping to catch as many people as possible on launch day based on hype.

          Don't like it? Then go tell OnLive (or the relevant person, if you work for them)

          • You don't have the slightest amount of technical knowledge about this service. I mean what the devil does this even mean? "Remember that you don't just have to take ping time in to account with data transfer, but the time it takes to transfer all the data." They've specified the bandwidth required to run their service at each resolution. Everything you said is just asinine.

            There was a great video where the creator of the service presented in front of a university class discussing the technology and ove

            • Re:Greetings OnLive Shill/Fanboy (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @09:44PM (#31433568)

              Sorry but I do understand how it works, because I understand networking and video compression both very well. That's all it does. Input from the player's PC is sent to the OnLive servers, the game does with it what it will, the resulting image stream is then compressed and sent to the client PC.

              As for ping time and bandwidth mattering if you don't understand, it means you don't understand networking. So, a ping is more or less a small (or zero) payload packet that you send to a server and get a response. Very low overhead. It represents minimum round-trip transit time. Meaning if you have a ping of, say 100ms, your computer will start receiving data from the server not less than 100ms from making the request. Ok, all well and good. However real data isn't 0 bytes. There is an actual data stream to transfer before you can use it. You have to get all the data. How fast that happens depends on the speed of your connection. so suppose your payload is 100kbits. On a 56k modem, it would take about 1800ms to transfer which with a 100ms ping would mean 1900ms from the time a request was sent. On a 1mbps connection, it would take only 100ms to transfer, total of 200ms. On a 100mbps connection it would take 1ms to transfer, 101ms total.

              As such both ping AND transfer rate play in to what kind of lag you get with actual data.

              That is one of the reasons why they are saying you need a bigger connection than the actual data stream, other wise the transfer of the video would add too much lag.

              Sorry if you want this thing to be great, but there are real issues of the Internet and so on that they are contending with, things that PR speak can't make go away. You can't magically tell someone's connection to have less lag.

        • I know who you work for. You'll be needing a new job starting in July.

    • One review site that got sued for posting thoughts about the beta of OnLive basically said that the latency from the time you input a command to the time it shows up on the screen made 1st/3rd person shooter type games entirely unplayable. You would "overshoot" your target when trying to aim at something, and that problem is not solvable, end of story. REAL gaming systems render the client side with virtually zero latency from the controller, so when you let go of the thumbstick your cursor stops NOW. The O

      • That review site was PC Perspective, and the man who wrote it hijacked a friend's account and was 2000 miles (twice the recommended limit of 1000 miles) from the nearest game server.

        In fact the server constantly warned him about his lag, and sometimes refused to let him even connect. The preview was hardly professional and mostly a disservice. But then, you either already knew that or simply weren't interested in the facts, and wanted to smear the service in your mind because anything new scares you.

    • Lag would be a big issue. Games like World of Warcraft are built from the ground up with latency issues in mind. It's part of the reason they have things like a 'Global Cooldown.' Even then, especially in things like PVP, it's not exactly perfect.

      I can't imagine that 'twitch' games like first person shooters could be anything but annoying given even minimal lag.

  • guaranteed failure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:24PM (#31432540) Homepage Journal
    The business model is flawed from square-one. This is going to sink into bankruptcy very, very quickly. The overhead is pretty significant and profit is required rapidly to keep it afloat. The problem is that there is very little incentive for anyone to sign up. They are competing with consoles AND pc games, yet they only offer pc games. People that are inclined to play PC games already have hardware that can handle it. Those who are not inclined, are on consoles. If their hardware isn't state-of-the-art, they play older games and save for newer hardware. $14.95 a month is so steep, it is only really the type of subscription fee that could be paid by someone who has enough money to buy a computer serious enough to play contemporary games.

    This will join cue-cat, divx, and broadcast.com in the tomb of ideas that suckered investors yet were non-movers in the marketplace.

    Seth

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xugumad ( 39311 )

      Yeah... they might be just about competitive against PCs, but on a 4-5 year console lifespan they're not even in the same ballpark...

    • $15/month is steep, but it depends on the cost of games. If people get a discount for buying them through OnLive, that right there is a huge incentive.
    • I have a $400 laptop with integrated graphics. So no Duke Nukem Forever for me. But I have an internet connection and can possibly pay $15 a month. If the service actually worked as its advertisements claim, it would be something to think about. So the point of all that is, while the people who play PC games tend to already have the hardware for it, this could appeal to people who would play such games but don't have the hardware for it. But I think they should ask Vonage what happens to companies whose ser

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wovel ( 964431 )

      I am sure Mark Cuban is all torn up about the 6 Billion dollars (well I think after he sold it all of he actually walked away with about $4B) Yahoo paid for broadcast.com. Since Yahoo merged it into all their other media services it is difficult to call it a "failure". It is difficult to call it much of anything at all. It was clearly not worth $6B or $4B (Cuban has alluded to his own disbelief several times in interviews). In another 24 months Google would have likely paid even more after streaming med

  • Cloud Computing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mprinkey ( 1434 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:26PM (#31432552)

    I can't wait for this newest bubble to burst. Thin clients haven't really been embraced for office apps where 95% of the functionality can run in the browser and it will work reasonably well. How can you expect to compete with native apps on PCs where performance is cheaply had so long as you don't need to run at the highest settings...or on consoles which look almost as good? The problem for game companies is that many folks have realized that they can play year old games on cheap new hardware to great effect...after the game is reduced to 50%.

    I don't see the market niche. Hardcore gamers won't touch it. Casual gamers will baulk at the $15/month by in BEFORE you get the privilege to buy/rent a game. So, who will want this unless the games are steeply discounted? $180/year could be well spent on local hardware upgrades.

    • Re:Cloud Computing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:47PM (#31432726)

      I can't wait for this newest bubble to burst. Thin clients haven't really been embraced for office apps where 95% of the functionality can run in the browser and it will work reasonably well. How can you expect to compete with native apps on PCs where performance is cheaply had so long as you don't need to run at the highest settings...or on consoles which look almost as good? The problem for game companies is that many folks have realized that they can play year old games on cheap new hardware to great effect...after the game is reduced to 50%.

      I don't see the market niche. Hardcore gamers won't touch it. Casual gamers will baulk at the $15/month by in BEFORE you get the privilege to buy/rent a game. So, who will want this unless the games are steeply discounted? $180/year could be well spent on local hardware upgrades.

      Besides ... they'll have to contend with Valve's Steam.

      • Steam just sells you games to play on your system. You buy a game, Steam downloads it to your computer, and you run it. The idea with Online is that they run the game. You just have a little video playerish client that you use. You don't need to have hardware that can run the game.

        Both online services, but different ideas. Onlive is for people who want to play games on a low end system. Steam is for people who want to play games on their computer, but can't find their pants to go to the store and buy them.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Cryacin ( 657549 )

          but can't find their pants to go to the store and buy them.

          Thank GOD for steam!

    • Right... and you think the majority of people in the US upgrade their computers every 2 or 3 years to play the latest games? Do you understand the appeal of being able to play Crysis on a netbook, or even on your Wi-Fi enabled smartphone? Or on... god forbid Linux?!
    • We use thin clients and Citrix windows a lot at my company, and they barely function well enough to get the job done. Good luck if you try running a video through one.

    • I can't wait for this newest bubble to burst

      Has it occured to you how beneficial it would be for this to succeed within a casual gamer niche, in terms of what it would mean for bandwidth caps and internet speed? More high-bandwidth apps pushing the envelope is a good thing.

  • Broadband Cap? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wisnoskij ( 1206448 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:34PM (#31432626) Homepage

    Has anyone heard how much this will eat into broadband cap?
    and what internet speed is needed to play?

    Their is one thing I know, I would not want to be stuck with a game that I cannot play till the start of a new month because I decided to watch a few youtube videos.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) *

      Seeing as you need a 5Mbps connection to play, I'd assume quite a bit! :)

      • An earlier report [rockpapershotgun.com] mentioned it would chew through 1.5 Mb/s; the figure you quote is probably more realistic. But even using the smaller figure, if you had a cap of, say, 30 GB/month, you'd eat through it in 44 hours.

        Or at 5 Mb/s, 13 hours. Enjoy your half-hour of gameplay per day!

    • It seems to use 1mbps for their "HD" stream, which is 720p (sorta, rather low quality 720p from the look of it). For that they currently say you need 5mbps, earlier it was seeming they were saying 10mbps. It's possible they refined things, but more likely that they've just decided that excluded too many potential customers and will screw people with worse service.

      So the 1mbps thing seems to be pretty solid in terms of usage. That translates to about 440 megabytes per hour of gameplay.

      As for speed you'll nee

  • Mayday! Mayday! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PapagenoX ( 847958 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:39PM (#31432666)
    This is so going to go down in flames. I give it 6 months.

  • Do not want (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dave562 ( 969951 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:43PM (#31432694) Journal

    I'm probably missing something here, but why would I want to pay $15 for the privledge of buying software from OnLive?

    • you're not buying anything.

      you're playing the games remotely.

      the games are running remotely. hehe. As if that will ever work.

      You're paying to play them remotely. No word on if rentals will cost anything over your monthly fee.

      Seems doomed to epic failure.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dave562 ( 969951 )

        Oh, I see. Remote, 3d accelerated gaming. Color me skeptical. In the business world they are having problems getting 20+ people on 8+ core terminal servers. Those people are only running business apps that while potentially processor intensive while running queries, don't have nearly the overhead that a typical FPS has. I'd like to see some internal documents from the company about how many people they are planning to cram on each server, and what the specs on those servers are. Is there even a decent

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by SETIGuy ( 33768 )
          I'm pretty sure they do the 3D on the remote side and send highly compressed display data which is decoded locally. I don't know if they are doing full frame video compression (ex. H.262/3/4 codecs), or just sending portions of the display that have been updated (ex. VNC or RDP).
      • You know... to experience what this 'service' would be like, load up a game on a friend's computer who lives at least a few hundred miles away. Connect to that friend's via a VNC client or other form of remote access and see how well that game plays. That's basically what OnLive is providing for $15/ mo.
    • Hopefully they offer a discount to the games. I feel like that's the best way to attract customers. The real sweet spot would be a $10 discount, so anyone comparing the retail version and the OnLive version would constantly be confronted with the choice of paying more or less for a game.

  • a option for the ipad perhaps (Score:3, Funny)

    by radradrobotank ( 1742836 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @07:57PM (#31432798)

    Not a WOW player, would WOW be playable on a ipad using this service? WOW players are used to subscription services, whats a extra $14.95 a month if you can play WOW in the bath.

  • I don't know if I'd use this for games, but I saw a demo of this running some very expensive software recently, and it was pretty amazing. If you could rent time on the software at a reasonable price, and get good performance over OnLive, it might be worthwhile.

    Say you are a CAD designer. It turns out that there are six or seven high-end CAD packages, that each have their strengths and weaknesses. If you could rent the one you need for a particular job, it might be a good deal, rather than fork out $5000

    • Say you are a CAD designer.

      If you are a CAD designer, wouldn't you just design your own CAD package, instead of running somebody else's?

    • Remember that at a business, this kind of thing has long been possible and without many of the drawbacks. I can set up a Windows Terminal Server and more or less any Windows software can be run off that on to anything that can do RDP, be it a low power Windows box, a Linux box, or a thin client. All processing is done on the server and on a LAN, interface speed feels extremely near native.

      However, it is extremely unpopular. You just don't see it used hardly at all. Instead businesses buy people their own co

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wovel ( 964431 )

        Thin clients are gaining popularity in many corporate IT environments, not losing it. Your confused and/or misinformed.

  • I'm sure OnLive will be every bit as successful as WebTV was. And for the same reasons, too.

  • It took me awhile to figure out what the point in all this was. Well, besides someone making themselves a middleman for profit.

    What it boils down to is this. Piracy, as far as computer games are concerned, is essentially the use of an executable(and it's associated files) without permission.

    This whole scheme is simply testing the viability of never letting that executable out in the wild in the first place. No executable to crack, no piracy. Obviously, this will not work unless they also stop selling boxed

  • People have been upset lately at publishers like Ubisoft requiring an internet connection to play a game. This totally trumps even that model, as you need an internet connection to stream the game content. Not only that, but how can you make a pirated copy of a game you aren't even running the code to?

    1. Profit!

  • Can I HomeBrew this? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeadboltX ( 751907 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @10:15PM (#31433774)
    Any idea what kind of software they are using to relay the "real time" video from their servers to your computer? I'd love to be able to have my weak laptop connect up to my powerhouse gaming machine for same gaming on the couch, but programs like VNC are waaaay too slow to do this.

    If these companies are achieving moderate detail over the internet, how can I accomplish this on my LAN?

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