OnLive Game Service Hits PC, Mac in June

I'd like to see what realworld latency issues occure.

There is no way that games will be playable with all the latency associated with this. Also, the games you play will most likely have lowered settings, since they cannot hope to run Crysis on very high for thousands of clients, and still make a profit.

I would like to be able to play my Steam collection with that service. Otherwise no dice! I doubt anyone would re buy their entire gaming library for this.

sounds too perfect ~

No interest. Not demos and watching for $15. No sale. Go away.

No competitive FPS with 2x the latency for me.

And will it be able to render more then 10 Crysis sessions at a time without bringing the cloud down?

So... OnLive users = free kill points. OK by me.

a true gamer can work at a part time job and save enough money to build a decent rig for $1000 bucks. This service is nice...but c'mon now, i love my rig.

This is not going to end well. All ISP's have latency inducing equipment and they are not going to upgrade any time soon(Broadband plan or no). This will work well for anything MMO speed or slower. FPS, fighting games, real time strategy, all of those will be laggy. People closer to the servers will dominate any multi-player competition(geographical discrimination, I'm gonna sue!). Someday when EVERYTHING is fiber and data flows at the speed of light, and there are servers in every city, this type of gaming may become the norm but until then you can not bend the rules of physics, there will be noticeable lag, and I know I'm not paying for this shit. Hell I can't even stream Netflix without it pausing once in a while how the hell do they think their going to run whole gaming architecture this way?

Let me get this straight, they want me to pay $15.00 for what??? That's just like charging someone who wants to walk into McDonald's just so they can at least smell the food...

With your own mid range computer you can easily get 1900x1200 resolution on mid-high settings. If you have a high end computer you can up it to 2560x1600. There is no method i know of that can stream 1200p or 1600p resolution video down a non-fibre internet line at 60fps.

So the only thing i can think of is a 480p steam. I'm not really sure about this service. I might just be pessimistic. Id like to see it in action verses a decent local computer and see how the latency/bandwidth/graphics actually stack up side by side.

isn't this US only?

$15? HA! Not a chance...

Trying to steal casual gamers from Facebook.

For real gamers this = fail.

Well, aside from latency issues (where the difference between 20 and 200 milliseconds makes or breaks some games, what about bandwidth caps? Right or wrong, bandwidth caps are already here, and these types of service seem designed to blow them and make us pay for the priveledge. No thanks.

No word on why they delayed the original planned "winter 2009" release...

Whats really funny is that none of you have used the service so how can you predict that it doesnt work? I have been in the onlive beta testing and it seems too good to be true but I can honestly say it works and well I might add.

I cant say much but I will say that all you people saying that latency is an issue are wrong. They have been working with all the isp's on anything related to bandwith(peak usage,bandwith caps,etc). The only thing that will hold you back is how fast your connection is. If your rockin 10mbs and up, you will be playing games at high resolution but if your lower it depends on the game.

The first thing I did was play crysis warhead and jacked up the anti-aliasing to 8 and since my connection supported it, I must say that it worked very well.My 2500dollar i7 rig cant even play crysis with the anti jacked up to 8. But we all know crysis is a very broken and horribly programmed game but unfortunately its the yardstick and has been for 3 years.

I dont like the pricing structure but this service just may calm down this gpu arms race and lower prices cause if this catches on, no one will need a $600 gpu anymore.

Your connection will determine if your going to play at 1920x1080. Your resolution will downgrade if your isp cant support it. If your like me and have a 1080p monitor and above thats native, if you have to play at lower resolution you have to do it in windowed mode. Anything under your monitor native will look weird.

Ive said too much so understand that I cant go into further detail. I cannot reply to questions. But have a little faith in technology it does work.

$15 a month wouldn't be too bad if they include a few game rentals in the price. Maybe if rentals were $5 per week and the monthly sub includes 3 rentals per month. I'd consider it. Right now, I'm not even signing up for the free 3 month trial...

I suppose if your a console gamer this would be a good way to go. But if your a pc gamer like me it's just downgrading. There are some good things about it though, well, good and bad.

Good-
1. going to help with selling pc games, since you have to
buy your own games, or they have to buy them. So it'll help
the pc gaming industry one way or another.

2. No need to upgrade ( I read on another site they are gonna upgrade there servers every 6 months. how is that possible? I don't know.)

3. More people to play with on pc servers.

4. No more red ring of deaths, well, its basically just a terminal with a controller so I cant really see them having major issues with heat.

5. Limited games

BAD-

1. mentioned before- latency

2. Graphics change according to bandwidth, so if your bandwidth is being bottlenecked for some reason, the graphics could go from great, to ok, to crap.

3. Cost- 15 dollars a month isn't bad, but if you have to buy all your games again, plus the unit itself, plus you need a pc to hook it up 2. Even then it's not that bad, but it's still like renting something you'll never own. And, what happens if the server go's down? Your out of luck. At least consoles you can play without internet. Reminds me of Ubisofts drm.

4. Upgrades- yeah, they are gonna upgrade every six months, but to how much? And if they don't get enough players, how are they gonna afford to upgrade to play the newest games? If it works like a cloud they might not have to upgrade as much, but I suppose it depends on how many people are playing at once. Reminds me of the iphone and at&t's network.


My questions-

1. Controllers? Accessory upgrades? Mouse keyboard?

2. I heard a new format is coming out within the year or so called ultra h.d. Pc's will already support it, but I doubt this will.

3. I wonder how streaming 1080p is going to affect ISP's. Especially the ones that have put caps in place.



Conclusion- If I didn't have a pc and if my only choice was a console because of lack of funds, I'd definately consider it, But I do own a pc. I think it's a good thing though, in concept anyways. Hopefully they will be able to work out all the bugs. But I think it might be a few years.

so if my 486 has internet connection...

ROFL bin1127, good point too!!

Now a game: Supreme Commander has always lagged insanely even on the most powerful machines if you created enough units.

if they promise good performance I hope to see it run fluently at highest settings without any noticeable performance drop... probably not going to happen though.

hope they dont just turn graphics down if they cannot handle the load.

I'd be game if I was rocking a gigabit fibre, but alas, I'm not, and I have a 50ms latency of severs only a few kilometres away and 150ms for anything in anything even central US.
Plus, my cap is 100GB. I already use 200-300GB a month, my ISP would not like that.
How much do they compress the signal? For high quality high resolution gaming, would we need a powerful GPU to just decode it?
What is the cloud actually powered by? It's it all CPU, is it a CPU/GPU mix? Would we essentially just have a i7/5870m server rack dedicated to every player?

I already pay $50 a month for my net, I pay $60 per game. I'll be hard pressed to spend an additional $15 a month for the service. I damn well better be able to play games I already own (such as my steam games, my legit PC games and my entire xbox collection, because I hate buying the same game twice).
However, if it works as intended, I'll gladly sell my $2000 rig that I put blood, sweat, and tears into.

More importantly, when will affordable ultra low latency fibre come to major Canadian cities? I think that's the only deciding factor for me really.

why dont you fools asking all these questions look at the onlive website

Let me see reviews of EXPERIENCED gamers. The statement that testers could not even notice the different between cloud gaming and real gaming makes me wonder who they have testing.
I applied for the the beta testing almost a year ago but no reply :

My mind is playing tricks on me. I could have sworn I read another article that procided more information about the latency issue. It seemed like it would not be all that bad.