Hello my fellow techies, I'm sure many of you have heared about the new gaming platform On Live, I would like to hear your opinions of this upcoming service, especially any that have network programming experience. I think if they can get it to work it could be a revolution in gaming, however I am concerned with the inevitable latency issues. For those that haven't heard about it, here is a link; http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47081.html

The idea sounds like an updated version of Gametap but I'm not sure it's anything other than a ploy to start another console brand. Essentially they are asking people to buy a piece of hardware to play games on a tv. If the idea works, MS will probably start a rental service attached to it's live service and obliterate it.

I guess alot depends on how much it costs.

I'll believe it when I see it. The last time we heard amazing claims from an industry unknown, it turned out to be a mafia money laundering scheme *cough*Phantom*cough*.

Seems pretty useless for the large number of people with bandwidth caps. Some ISPs here have limits as low as 1GB downstream / month, and I gather that the standard for BT is 4GB (Although that may have changed).

I'm interested in seeing the response by the large companies effected by this decision (MS, Sony, Nintendo, AMD, Intel, NVidia and ATI), I can't see them rolling over and playing dead. IIRC they are capable of decompressing an entire frame in less than 1 ms, for the life of me I can't see how they're doing this or even getting this compression ratio. It will be interesting reading the patents when they're around, they've got 11 years worth of protection before clones can appear.

At least gametap and phantom work on a thick client model, I can't see this being of any worth due their thin client model, and how poorly thin clients deal with latency in both input and output. The press this is getting reminds me of the press of DonnyBrook, and it's hard to even find traces of DonnyBrook anymore

Quote: Original post by eedok
At least gametap and phantom work on a thick client model

The phantom never worked. That product was about as real as this, and every other product that has nothing but a bunch of 3d product renders.

It's an investor cash grab.

Well had it come out that's how it would have worked, as the box was poised to actually have some processing power, where as this they say will work on abysmal CPU's and doesn't require a GPU to run the games.

This is an old idea. Using thin clients to run games has been discussed on this site before years ago. If they have the server centers close enough to customers I'd imagine it could work. I used to play PS with a 40 ms latency and the game never lagged so it's all up to their servers it would seem. Then again this On Live thing won't have client input response. Any latency will destroy this idea.

[Edited by - Sirisian on March 25, 2009 9:54:41 AM]

Let's assume latency isn't an issue. The bandwidth still will be. Claiming that you won't ever have to worry about low end machines anymore is slightly a misnomer, because unless you have an extremely old machine, the overall experience won't be better. 720p and compressed graphics. So, if you have a PC which can run a game on a resolution of 1280x720 or better, you'll be getting a better experience than OnLive. Just because perception makes a television screen appear better than a computer screen doesn't take into account the distance between the TV and yourself vs the Monitor and yourself.

As for sending it over to a computer, while it will make compatibility issues a thing of the past, I pretty much agree with ChurchSkiz that it then would only be an updated version of GameTap.

But regardless of the validity of OnLive, future consoles are going to be going this route anyway. And honestly, digital downloads and streaming sort of scare me.