OnLive: Thin client gaming

(IGN article and an hour long speil on Gamespot)

So here's the quick run-down: they have a building full of high end PCs running the games. They compress the video output with some uber compression hardware so that they can output 720p in realtime, send it over the internet, and you play it either on your TV or PC. You play around with your controller (or mouse/keyboard), which gets sent to the uber PC in their building. You can buy permanent access to games, rent them, or pay a monthly fee though prices are still up in the air.

On the plus side....

DEATH TO PIRATES! You can't copy it because you haven't got it. About all you can do is hack somebody else's account. Pretty much the same as MMOs in that regard.

No more spending $1500 plus every couple of years for the latest PC. Play at max settings (well, almost, see below) on whatever klunker you've got.

Somebody else handles all the hardware/driver issues. If some game only works under XP Service Pack 1 with two year old drivers, that's what it will play on. Patches are just there when they are ready.

Instant replay - save the last 10 seconds of video feed anytime. (They also resume games they were playing before. Long before. No idea if there are a certain number of pauses you can have saved off.)

No-download demos. If you are curious about a game, you can check it out right NOW. (And, no doubt, buy it with the click of a couple of buttons. Impulse buys r00l.)

They can copy the feed, so you can watch somebody else play on your PC/TV (if they allow it) without degrading the gameplay.

The Bad

I think filling up a 5mbs connection all day is going to destroy most ISPs if this gets popular. Cable companies are already talking about moving to a pay-per-gigabyte system. (Though he's right at the end of that video - they are almost pure download, very little uploading.)

Even if they have uber compression of the gods, they still have to go through the net. Lag kills. (Same as MMOs here, too.) If you are still on dail-up, forget it.

Got a cool mod? Tuff. Maybe some real popular mods can get installed but I doubt you'll get many. What about the more naughty ones, like switching the Witcher over to the Polish version with English subtitles? (Hmmm - or would it be possible? Oblivion would let you pick what mods you want to use in any given game session. For mods like that, it might just be possible. If OnLive is willing to support them.)

720p isn't bad for console games, but is kinda sad for us PC gamers.

You need to be within about 1000 miles of one of their data centers. If you want to play with somebody else, that other person needs to be on the same data center.

Prediction

If it even kind of works, game companies are going to love it. I wouldn't be surprised if games started coming out for OnLive (or some company like them) exclusively. First off, they have no worries about pirates. Second, not only do they get to develop for a particular platform, they get to pick the exact platform! Not just "for PC" but "make it for a PC with 4 CPU cores, ALchemy, nVidia graphic chips, and the 185.61 drivers." That's got to save tons of development and testing time.

What happens if OnLive gets popular, I have no idea - other than ISPs begging for mercy and/or charging by the gigabyte. (But even if they do, would it be cheaper to pay for the gigabytes or for a new PC?) Would AMD and nVidia keep pouring money into researching faster/cheaper/better cards when the only folks buying them are folks without the bandwidth to handle OnLive and a few datacenters?

If this becomes the standard, then good night. It will completely erase the secondary market, and that's a major point I see there.

I'm heavily disturbed by this thing.

I actually like the concept. I doubt it'll be able to fly, at least at this point in time (for PC gaming). I put some of those 'pluses' in doubt. Unless every game comes for that, are you not going to buy a video card if you like Diablo games and Diablo 4 is not in it? How about mods? And 720p? pfft! For PC gamers that's like so 1999.
I also have my doubts even for console games. Except for FPS, consoles require a much faster 'reaction time' because of their focus on twitch games. Try pulling a XBBXAX combo through a 40KB/s upload connection that may be shared by VoIP, streams, etc.
And obviously there's the point of the bandwidth caps, but that's been discussed already.

wolfing said:

Try pulling a XBBXAX combo

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What's that ?

Alrik Fassbauer said:

What's that ?

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I don't know, to me all console gamepad button combos look like that

Yeah, fighting games would be hell. First person shooters, too. Anything with split second timing would be nasty. (And people living "close" to the datacenters would have a serious advantage over those out on the edges.) But then, people are already doing those kinds of games over the net. Even the fighting games have online matches. It seems they all work better than they have any right to work.

Other games would do just great. Turn based strategy like Civ or GalCiv would be a piece of cake. MMOs are already designed with lag in mind so they should be pretty easy, too.

720p reeks for sure. That's about 75% of my pixels gone, and I'm sure this compression is going to have to be at least a little bit lossy, so it will likely be even more than that. Mod difficulties worry me, too, though I'm hoping game designers can get around those problems some way.

On the other hand, letting game designers/coders target one specific machine setup has got to be a huge help for design and support costs. Knowing every single machine that runs your game has CUDA means you can actually design important parts of the game around it, instead of just having it be a nice bit of optional fluff. On top of having lower design/support costs, you also get higher revenue because fewer people are stealing your games. More money for future development! Better games!!

So big heaping piles of bad next to big heaping piles of good, with a few stacks of "errr?" scattered around. Should be fun. (If it works at all.)

wolfing said:

I don't know, to me all console gamepad button combos look like that

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Ah, I forgot console gamepad buttons have kind of letters on them, have they ?

I hardly ever use one, because I don't own one.

What's the price of this service?

That would seem to be the defining factor - because it HAS to be less than a decent rig to make sense, right?

DArtagnan said:

What's the price of this service?

That would seem to be the defining factor - because it HAS to be less than a decent rig to make sense, right?

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It's not determined yet, but I bet it'll be some sort of monthly fee for 'standard' games and probably an extra for 'premium' games or something.

I've heard a monthly fee, rental, and "buy" (in the sense that you pay once and can play it forever). The only fee structure I don't see is the pay-per-minute kind, so it will likely be that.

Yeah, I guess.

But I have a hard time seeing how they can make this work without the fee being pretty significant. No matter how good their compression technology is, they're gonna need some SICK hardware running the games - and as we all know, such hardware isn't cheap. Unless they have some great deals - the cost is the same as for us consumers - so they can't gain any momentum here.

Beyond the hardware running the games, they gotta ensure they have enough bandwidth to provide a 100% smooth experience (minimal latency) at all times - for all their players. That's a pretty serious internet connection, and that also can't be entirely cheap.

So, it's my "gut feeling" that the cost of this service will either be similar to what a decent rig would cost to maintain (upgrade every few years) or even higher.

The only way they'd make this a success is by having the technology be sufficiently "cool" to convince people before they've even started thinking about numbers.

Also, the consumer better keep in mind that even though he doesn't need a great rig, he STILL needs a rig capable of streaming that kind of video content - and if he wants anything resembling a high-end rig, he's gonna want 720p streaming which isn't possible on just any rig. So there's that cost ON TOP of the service fee.

Nah, I can't see it working for anyone wanting to save money. This tech is gonna be for "cool" people, or people who REALLY, REALLY don't want to mess around with PC problems.

If it turns out to be cheaper: color me confused.

DArtagnan said:

Also, the consumer better keep in mind that even though he doesn't need a great rig, he STILL needs a rig capable of streaming that kind of video content - and if he wants anything resembling a high-end rig, he's gonna want 720p streaming which isn't possible on just any rig. So there's that cost ON TOP of the service fee.

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You don't really need a 'rig'. If I understand correctly, you'll have the option of using your PC or they'll provide you with a 'mini-console' which gets and processes the stream, and then output it as video signal (I guess with USB connectors so you plug input devices). I think I read the cost of this 'mini-console' is yet to be determined (it could even be free if you subscribe for a year or whatever)

wolfing said:

You don't really need a 'rig'. If I understand correctly, you'll have the option of using your PC or they'll provide you with a 'mini-console' which gets and processes the stream, and then output it as video signal (I guess with USB connectors so you plug input devices). I think I read the cost of this 'mini-console' is yet to be determined (it could even be free if you subscribe for a year or whatever)

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Let's just wait and see

It's getting nearer. Steve Perlman did a lecture at an engineering school (http://tv.seas.columbia.edu/videos/545/60/79?file=1&autostart=true) where he explains to a bunch of students what's going on. Pretty technical but VERY interesting if you're into that stuff. A few things that stand out…

There are two video streams. One is delayed by seconds but is a more conventional 'perfect' picture that gets sent to people watching you play. The video stream being sent to the player, though, is done very differently. It uses a totally different method of compression. If a packet that helps describe the picture doesn't show up on time then the decompression chip deals with it in a way that doesn't look nasty. It also uses perception tricks so the picture looks good as long as it's in motion but doesn't look so great if you freeze frame it. The cost of the chips to crunch both video streams down is about $35 per player.

The mini-console thing is even cheaper. He says the casing to hold the chips is more expensive than the chips.

Instead of having a couple of ISPs, they have contracts with a LOT of ISPs. They actually sniff out the best route from their datacenter to you using all those ISPs and use that route. That avoids having your packets bouncing around the nation before getting to you.

Virginia, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas(?), and southern California get datacenters. Oh, he mentions a datacenter in New York, too. Range is about 1000 miles.

Voice is uploaded, too. The mini-console has a bluetooth receiver for headphones.

He goes into a lot of detail regarding the economics. OnLive kills piracy and the used game sales, which is why the publishers (with the notable exception of Activision) are all over this thing.

They made a special wireless controller with extra low latency. Not a surprise. Every millisecond of latency reduces the range. They consider 80ms to be the maximum acceptable latency time. I play MMOs with 300ms latency time without much problem so they are being pretty strict.

He's still talking about starting up this winter. The lecture was recorded in mid-November.

I've got an HD TV sitting right above my computer monitor. Maybe it's time to figure out how to hook my PC up to the thing.

Zloth said:

OnLive kills piracy and the used game sales, which is why the publishers (with the notable exception of Activision) are all over this thing.

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Of course.

They do not want us to buy and play older games.

They want us to put our money into new games.

Perpetuum mobile.

This is imho similar to companies for example refusing to repair electronic or not-so-electronic devices, like toasters, for example, but instead demanding the customer to buy a new one, of he or she wants a correctly working one.

This is also quite similar to charge money ("fees") for updates - which are normally meant to repair a thing.

Forcing customers to perpetually buy new items, and fogetting/abandoning older ones almost instantly is imho a VERY efficient way to increase the sales.

It's like designing devices (like toasters) so that they WILL break down after several years. And then you MUST buy a new one, because no-one repairs it anymore ...

!?!? A typical toaster costs $25. Paying for a repair would cost at least $40. Nobody fixes toasters because it's cheaper for the factory to make a new one than to repair an old one. In insurance terms, any broken toaster is "totalled."

I haven't seen anything saying that OnLive will never put old classics up. I don't see why they wouldn't, either. If you watch the video, you'll see the guy seems pretty excited about putting low-end games up because they don't even need a video card, they can just run off CPU. That means less hardware costs and less cooling costs for them so they can provide the game for cheaper.

Zloth said:

Nobody fixes toasters because it's cheaper for the factory to make a new one than to repair an old one.

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This is exactly what i mean.

Repairing things has become absolete.

We call this in Germany a "throw-away society".

To me, this is nothing but a waste of resources, to rather produce a new toaster than to repair it.

Just imagine how much material is needed for a new toaster and for a repair.
Compare both amounts of needed material.
This is what I mean.

To be ecological, this would require a really good recycling system. But do we know if it really works ? Where is all our waste going to ? Into huge burners [read: waste burning facilities] being reduced to ash ?

Imagine how much oil is used to produce plastic.
It is taken away from the earth.

Now, where does it go to ? Into - let's say - toasters.

Any time a toaster is broken down, it is thrown away. And a new one is bought.

This amount of oil is taken away from the recycling system, if the waste goes into huge waste deposits or is burned in burning facilities to ash.

If it is burned, it is gone. Forever. It cannot be extracted out of the ash anymore.

Waste deposits ... well, let's wait until several hundred years into the future ... They will be desparate to get out resources from our waste deposits !

Because with our speed of taking away oil - that needs several hundred thousands of years to be "produced" within the earth, and that only under very special circumstances (I once studied Geology, I know that) - so with our current speed of taking oil away from the earth's Lagerstätten (this word is German, but a world-wide term used in Geology), there'll be no more oil in a few hundred years. Burned away to ash.

And THEN they will be trying to use other ways to get to oil. They'll open up OUR current waste deposits. THEY will become valuable, precious material !


That's why I regard throwing away than repairing items just a society's decadence. It has become too cheap, imho. People - companies - don't know the real value of earthly resources that are LIMITED.

We just go on as if nothing was limited at all. Like humans killed the last Mammuts, most probably (in the light of newer scientific research).

People in general have one big, bad habit : Going on as if things weren't limited at all.

And that was the death of the dodo.

Errrr... yeah. You want to talk about OnLive now?

I like OnLive, I just don't think it's feasible with bandwidth caps and latency, although I'm not that concerned about latency as the games I like are not 'twitchy' and I don't care about multiplayer. I signed up for the testing, will let you know how it goes if I get in.

Zloth said:

Errrr… yeah. You want to talk about OnLive now?

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You just don't look far enough.