OnLive will blow your mind

News have been filtering out from the Game Developers Conference about a new service that will debut in the winter of this year. The service is called OnLive and it promises to deliver a high quality gaming experience without the need of having a high end PC or, for that matter, a proprietary gaming console.

OnLive supposedly took seven years to develop and it’s really just an extension of cloud computing, albeit an incredibly elegant and practical implementation of it. The way it works is that the OnLive server clusters will do the majority of the processing for any game you wish to play, sending rendered frames to your less powerful computer. The developer promises that almost any PC or a TV with a special set top box will be able to run resource-intensive PC games.  The only thing your PC needs to be able to do is run a 1 MB browser plug in.

This is revolutionary for PC gaming. No need to install anything. No fussing with drivers. No worrying about whether or not your PC has a powerful enough graphics card, enough memory or enough processing to run any game out there at the highest resolution settings. The implications of this just blow me away. OnLive promises to deliver games at 60 frames per second, which will mean games will look as smooth as glass, at resolution rates of 1280 by 760.

There is a gotcha however, potentially a huge one. Since this service is dependent on remote servers that will be continually sending rendered frames to your local machines, it requires a pretty hefty Internet connection. Steve Perlman, OnLive’s CEO, states that the service will run best on 5 MB or better connections, which may rule out many who have lower end DSL lines. While the service will run on 2 MB or slower connections, the games will be comparatively lower in resolution when rendered by the service.

While broadband penetration rates have risen dramatically in the United States, many providers have instituted bandwidth caps, mostly as a response to limit peer-to-peer sharing networks. OnLive may have to contend with a potential audience that is living in the post RIAA era of reduced bandwidth. The service may actually get a stronger reaction in parts of East Asia. In Japan and Korea, 100+ MB Internet lines piped directly to your home are quite common.

I can see how game developers would be excited about this. With a service like this, their games could be opened up to a brand new segment. While game developers will still probably develop for a wide range of PCs, a service like this will give them new options, and may (if the service catches on) make worrying about hardware requirements a thing of the past

There’s a part of me that wants to be really cynical about this. The claims that the OnLive team makes are almost too good to believe. Will this really mean that my very underpowered 3 year computer will be able to run Crysis at max settings? That’s a huge leap of faith. In any case, I’ll be rooting for them, and I’ll be the first in line to sign up when they go live. Really. I really want this to work. Being able to run any game without fussing about hardware requirements will be a boon to me. Sure, it may mean that I may have to forgo 3rd party mods and other goodies that come with owning a locally installed copy, but I think that’s a small price to pay for the tremendous benefit..

See the video presentation of their service and decide for yourself if the service is real or merely hype:

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