Why OnLive won’t work

Now that the euphoria from the OnLive presentation at the GDC has dissipated a bit, there’s been a host of articles today that casts quite a bit of doubt of what OnLive claims it can deliver to what’s physically possible. Here’s a couple of the better ones:

Eurogamer makes three main points in its criticism of OnLive’s technology.

1. OnLive has mastered video compression that outstrips the best that current technologies can achieve by a vast margin. In short, it has outsmarted the smartest compressionists in the world, and not only that, it’s doing it in real-time.
2. OnLive’s unparalleled grasp of psychophysics means that it has all but eliminated the concept of IP lag during its seven years of “stealth development”, succeeding where the best minds in the business have only met with limited success.
3. OnLive has developed a range of affordable PC-compatible super-computers and hardware video encoders that are generations beyond anything on the market at the moment.

Of the three points Eurogamer makes, the most damning one is how to counter the notion of Internet lag. Just because you happen to have a large amount of bandwidth doesn’t make up for the fact that you may be hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away from the OnLive servers. Read more

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. Read more