OnLive: The Ford Zephyr Mark I, in digital form

[Fusion]

Yay for jokes only car followers will ever get.

OnLive is a service that appears to be a completely new revolutionary idea in the name of gaming.  Put simply: You won't ever need to upgrade your PC ever again, just use the OnLive module thing and it's provided 360-ish Game Controller and you're connected to the servers playing a game with a likely marginably acceptable frame rate.  This is the essence of cloud computing at work, with this being the first case of me really noticing it.

Imagine it: Playing Crysis on your crappy old 6150SE with 30-60 FPS (not sure on the details, but it goes up to 720p resolution last I heard) with minimal controller lag and high settings.

Official Website


If you ask me, this is as far fetched as you can get right now.  Network ISPs are not capable of handling this kind of traffic.  Plus you also cannot promise lag-free control because this is like playing a typical match of Smash Bros. Brawl: You'd see something coming, react, and end up seeing your character react too  late because your input was delayed in the name of sync.

I'm sorry, but the reference to that Ford car holds true here.  The U.S's network infrastructure or rather just about any network infrastructure just cannot handle this with the preciseness they promise.

[UHMEEEEBA]

Seems a bit unrealistic.

[K.O.D]

Would only work for people with really high speed connections and good ISP's at best, and only in USA and maybe a few european countries :P

[Jesuszilla]

In short, for those damn white people.

[Fusion]

A person on another forum I visit summed it up perfectly:

Stupid and bound for failure, for multiple reasons.

• Lag is the biggie. With "twitch" based games on the current model, a few dozen milliseconds is enough to make the difference between life and death, all other things (skill, hardware, etc) being equal. Under OnLive's system, you get the lag from your terminal to the server, the lag from another player's terminal to the server (in multiplayer games, anyway), and then the server's processing overhead to shuffle everything around, as well as crunch the data for the game itself and the compression of data for transmitting to the end-user.
  
• With any connectivity problem between the end-user and the server, the user can't play any of their games, not even the single-player ones they'd otherwise have access to, under the traditional setup of a powerful home PC running a locally available copy of a game.
  
• It's a nice "fuck you" to those who pay per minute or per KB of data transfer. "Unlimited" access is hardly universal.
  
• While things like Gametap (before it got stupid) and the "old games" service (whose full name I forget, offhand) show there are some who would pay for what's effectively a temporary, revocable license for software (if they close their doors or you get booted from the service for whatever reason, you're out of luck, and out of one or more games), it was only a small portion of gamers overall. And those services didn't have any processing overhead for not only routing data, but also processing the game software input/output and compressing the data stream so it's feasible without access to a T-2 (6.3Mbps, which is available in a lot of places but not exactly universal) or better line.

It's even worse than STEAM.  At least you can make STEAM work offline if you're good enough.