This week at DICE summit, Onlive demo more games to try to convince that its service is going to work. First of all, for those who aren't familiar with Onlive, it is a service that lets you play games streamed over the network without the need to invest in hardware. The game will be processed from Onlive server and send to your tv via a small device.
This week, they show Unreal tournament 3 and Burnout paradise. The game was reportedly run smoothly. Not only that, they also show Crysis played on an iPhone. Though it doesn't seem very effective cause the iPhone button is not suited to play Crysis, Steve Perlman wanted to show what kind of games that can be successfully implemented in their products.
Now for the catch, Onlive data center need to be within 1000 miles from your home.
Steve then produce a map of what seems to be Onlive data centers. While most of US area seems to be covered, it doesn't explain how population density will be affected.
You will also need 1.5 Mbps internet connection to play games in standard definition, 5 Mbps to play in High definition. Steve claim that there is 71% of US population that have 1.5 Mbps connection, while the latter should be just over a quarter.
While I am still skeptical with this product, I am eager to see how this is unfold. The idea is brilliant, but it tries to do too much thing at a time, maybe even too ahead for its time. There are a lot of possible things that can make this unsuccessful.
Firstly, potential customers are limited within US, multiplayer games are global. How Onlive will solve this? Secondly, obviously it won't be supported from console maker like Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. Meaning that Onlive will depended with third party games.
And there are lots of problems need to be addressed such as connection issues, pricing (Onlive vs owning a console), etc.
But hats off to Onlive, if they really can pull this off.. I'll will keep my eyes close on this streaming thing, because I believe it has a lot of potential to be the future of gaming industry.
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The first time I read about Onlive, I thought: "WHAT A STUPID IDEA",.
ReplyDeleteThe idea is not even theirs, sony used (or tried to, I don't know) something like this on with PSP: You use internet to connect to your ps3 from your psp, then you use your psp to play the ps3 game which is in you ps3...
However their success is highly unlikely:
01-many people don't have that kind of connection (mine is 56k dial-up)
02-many people would rather own a game than paying for it weekly...
03-Only U.S.
04-running these servers are really costing, so if they fail to attract a hell lot of people from the beginning, they're dead.
05-even if they did attract a lot of people, if they fail to keep them, they're dead.
06-if you don't have connection, you can't play.
07-this looks good for the few games like crysis that need an expensive pc to run, but for all other games, it's not worth it.
08-by now all people HAVE a console, so they just buy games for those systems.
09-Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo not supporting, no exclusives=death. look at all those consoles in the past that didn't have exclusives.
10-many people are afraid of systems that are completely based on internet.
11-imagine some hacker somewhere finds a way that would let you play for free, the servers would become overly busy, and Onlive wouldn't be earning a dime, =DEATH
12-people say: what if your servers are down, then I can't play right? I'll just buy the X360 game then.
13-many people are not interested in investing in something that has no clear future.
14-you don't know what games would be available for it, maybe that game you really like playing doesn't make it to Onlive because Microsoft have licensed it on X360 even it's a third party game.
15-It has a basic controller, so you can't play wii/ds games, they said in an interview that supporting PS3 is more difficult than 360, combine that with the fact that good PS3 games are usually sony's, and what's left is X360/PC. forget about exclusives and what you get is very very few (EA) games, it's just not worth it, people would by 360s instead.
16-Devices that implement a new technology usually fail to find enough customer...
17-and so on...... the system is just too full of flaws to survive....
yes, too many uncertain things that can jeopardies Onlive. I prefer Gaikai approach which bring a less advanced games via streaming. For example: Playing SNES game on streaming might reduce the bandwidth requirement or maybe even casual facebook games. This thing need to be taken one step at a time. HD games streaming? I can't even instantly stream youtube.
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