OnLive Is Now… Live

John_Keck

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 3, 2010
Messages
379
On Friday OnLive launched. OnLive is the gaming service where you remotely run games from the cloud and have the audiovisual output relayed back to your computer. And yes, it can run Crysis.

How is the latency? It is definitely noticeable, but I quickly got used to it. I played through the entirety of F.E.A.R. 2 with this latency and it didn't bother me. However, if you have a local copy of F.E.A.R. 2 running and switch back and forth, it takes a moment to adjust to the OnLive version.
 
i still want control of my games, res, details and so on.

wonder how well multiplayer games would work?
 
I was in the beta for it and there wasn't any *noticable* input lag. If all it's doing is sending mouse/keyboard input along the pipes, then a good ping should alleviate most of the input lag anyone is seeing. 20-40ms, I'd guess, is tolerable.
 
Its going to cost $4.95 a month for the service, and you have to purchase the games separately. So for $60 a year plus the cost of games you get 720p quality on your computer. Am I the only one that has zero interest in this. I thought PC gaming was supposed to be about pushing technology to make games beautiful. This just seems to want to replace PC gaming with another form of console gaming. I know console ports have become the norm, but we still get a handful of games a year that are vastly superior on a PC. I can see this being a good service in place of a console, but this seems to be pushing technology backwards instead of forwards.
 
Its going to cost $4.95 a month for the service, and you have to purchase the games separately. So for $60 a year plus the cost of games you get 720p quality on your computer. Am I the only one that has zero interest in this. I thought PC gaming was supposed to be about pushing technology to make games beautiful. This just seems to want to replace PC gaming with another form of console gaming. I know console ports have become the norm, but we still get a handful of games a year that are vastly superior on a PC. I can see this being a good service in place of a console, but this seems to be pushing technology backwards instead of forwards.

Its not being aimed at you or really 99% of the members of this forum. Its not going to replace retail/e-tail/digital sales of PC games. What it could do is give people another avenue into PC gaming that doesn't require them to either a spend up to and well over a grand for a pre-built system or try to learn to build their own computers. The set top box should be neat too. A nice, console-like, way to interface with the games making it even easier for those who are not, shall we say, technologically inclined.

PC gaming is, and always has been, about choice. Nothing more and nothing less. The whole "always pushing forward" crap is something people thought up only in recent years. Yes the PC has been a driving force behind game advancement in the past, but the platform has always given people options. Whether its in the early days when you could easily go Mac or DOS for gaming, to the days when there were dozens of control options, up to the days where you had the option of using a dedicated 3D Accelerator or not and now days well there are tons of different options for buying and playing your games. OnLive is simply another option. Will it last? I doubt it, but if it gets enough attention other companies will take its place and improve on what they started.
 
Its not going to replace retail/e-tail/digital sales of PC games.

You never know, since this can stop alot of piracy if not real game files are on your computer......
 
Though I've no intention of giving up my beloved desktop anytime in the near future, I can see this having utility for me. Specifically, at college I'm limited to a laptop. On the other hand, college provides an extremely fast internet connection...
 
so my old laptop can play 720p videos fine, but chokes on almost every game. This would basically allow for me to use my old laptop and play games that my new one may not be able to play yet.

the killer for me though would be the internet connection required. I wonder if there is anyway of lowering the resolution.
 
I can see the value in this service, I just don't think enough people will bite. Now lets say they charged 10-14$ a month and you had access to every game out there (not to own, but use) I could maybe see this catching on.
 
So for $60 a year plus the cost of games you get 720p quality on your computer

Actually you don't even get that. The Onlive video stream is highly compressed. It is like a 1mbit stream, which is not nearly enough to get good quality 720p@60Hz video. So what it means is you get the typical things you get with high video compression: Macroblocking, colour smearing, loss of fine detail, etc, etc. If you have a look at the video from the leaked review you can see this.

So their sales pitch of "Highest quality settings on any computer," is really a misnomer. A lot of what high quality settings buy you is things like better texture detail and so on, which will be lost due to the heavy video compression.

Not really any way around this, except to scale up bandwidth massively which not only costs a lot more, but also requires consumers to have bigger Internet connections and requires more decoding power. As an example 1080p Blu-ray @ 24fps is generally encoded at about 25mbps H.264. That's a very intense codec, more intense than what Onlive uses, and still even at that rate there's room for improvement.

So really, Onlive more offers you the visual quality of a lower end video card, if that, plus the lag of a net connection. Most people would be much better off just buying a cheap videocard.

If they could truly offer the same sort of thing you get from a high end card for cheap over the net, well maybe they'd have something but they can't.
 
Actually you don't even get that. The Onlive video stream is highly compressed. It is like a 1mbit stream, which is not nearly enough to get good quality 720p@60Hz video. So what it means is you get the typical things you get with high video compression: Macroblocking, colour smearing, loss of fine detail, etc, etc. If you have a look at the video from the leaked review you can see this.

the article states that it used 5.5mbit, or 700KBps for the stream.
 
The market OnLive is aiming for isn't the type to pirate stuff on a regular basis anyway.

That's not the point though...

If other companies see that this can stop piracy far better than what they have now, you don't think they will move over? And since the hardcore gamers are a smaller niche then the larger market, what we want doesn't matter as we have already seen game companies dubbing down games to suite the greater population, sure some game companies have opened their eyes and realized that alienating us can upset alot more people and if they do cater to use, they win in the end, but i don't think it is enough to compete versus a potential %0 piracy rate.

How many companies are or have moved over to consoles mainly because apparently piracy is so "rampant" on PC.
 
i was interested in this. my account is actually activated. but it cost too much so i lost all interest.
 
I love how one of the examples is World of Goo. A game that's been almost given away free twice in the past year, and that I imagine any computer can run.
 
If other companies see that this can stop piracy far better than what they have now, you don't think they will move over?

What incentive is there for them to do so? OnLive has serious drawbacks and is not a proven technology with a wide install base. It's not like an Xbox 360 or Steam. There would be a benefit to eliminating piracy, but they'd also lose 90% of their sales because there are too many people with shitty internet connections, bandwidth caps, and oh yeah...

... people who live in places where OnLive doesn't exist?
 
You never know, since this can stop alot of piracy if not real game files are on your computer......

This isn't replacing anything. It's the "cloud" punch word taken to the extreme, where no reasonable person shall venture. :p
 
I was in the beta as well and I'm a pretty hardcore FPS'er and I could not deal with the lag. Trying to play UT3 was unbearable and Quake Wars was almost as bad. I would be getting shot at and try to turn in the direction and start firing and I would always turn too far because of the lag. Definitely not for a twitch player or any action oriented games. For the casual games and slower paced games like RTS's and RPG's it would work.

The whole subscription based thing is cool but you have to buy your games at full price as well which is a turn off. If they changed their pricing structure they may get more people interested.

Also, as for someone who will invest a fair amount of money to a computer to game on, the loss of quality is a killer too. It's great because I was able to play on my laptop with a solid connection, but it's not something I would invest in for my primary gaming. I've got a decent sized monitor and respectable system, I'd like to make use of it. Hence, that's why I feel it's overpriced for what you are getting. If they could make it more efficient on slower connections to play on the go it'd be more attractive as well.

If they'd drop the prices on the games and maybe give you a digital copy to play locally on a computer that can handle it, like combining their existing service with a model like Steam, I think it would totally be worth it. But what they currently offer, while impressive, I think just won't meet the needs of most of the mainstream PC gaming market.
 
Subscription-based service to rent/purchase a substandard experience from the bountiful catalog of "multi-platform" (bad console-port) PC games.

Awesome. Where do I sign up?
 
If they'd drop the prices on the games and maybe give you a digital copy to play locally on a computer that can handle it

No publishers will allow new games to be sold at a significantly reduced price as they're not going to want to cannibalize their sales in other markets (or give the impression that they can afford to sell them at such a low price.) When Steam was first in the pipeline, there was all this talk about being able to sell games for way cheaper because of cutting out the middle man. Ya right.

At best, I could see their pricing structure for game purchases mirroring Steam's, where new games match traditional media, and older games get promotional deals.
 
No publishers will allow new games to be sold at a significantly reduced price as they're not going to want to cannibalize their sales in other markets (or give the impression that they can afford to sell them at such a low price.) When Steam was first in the pipeline, there was all this talk about being able to sell games for way cheaper because of cutting out the middle man. Ya right.

At best, I could see their pricing structure for game purchases mirroring Steam's, where new games match traditional media, and older games get promotional deals.

Yeah, a publisher would definitely fight that. But if OnLive was able to subsidize the initial cost and offset the loss with the revenue of the subscription prices, they could still allow the publisher to get a full ROI on the games by moving them in volume and OnLive taking a reduced cut when a game moves a certain number of copies. But that's unlikely to happen initially.
 
Regarding the game purchases, when you purchase say a game for onlive, do you also get an actual transferable digital copy for yourself? In the sense that I say buy a game for onlive, then down the the line I get a better computer and would like to play it locally. Would that mean rebuying the same game twice?

What if you already say have a copy of the game, would you still have to purchase essentially a second copy to use for onlive?

If its making you buy separate new licenses at full costs (not sure if they can match certain retail/steam sale prices), then it seems the end cost might end up running for more then just buying a capable PC.
 
Without transferable licenses any game you buy would be unusable if you decide to cancel your onlive account. I see this service working better for rental of games that cater to being played once. Long term games or games that provide vast openness for modability, like Dragon Age, i would won't a true copy.
 
Regarding the game purchases, when you purchase say a game for onlive, do you also get an actual transferable digital copy for yourself?

I'm going to guess no, otherwise they would be advertising that as a significant feature. That would be something that would be up to the third party publisher licensing, rather than the Onlive service. Most publishers are going to want to squeeze as much money out of you as possible. After all - part of the selling point of this service to the publishers was the ability to squash the used resale market.

Only publisher I can think of lately that's allowed for a single purchase to function cross-platform is Valve, where they're allowing old PC purchases to grant free Mac version downloads.
 
I was in the beta as well and I'm a pretty hardcore FPS'er and I could not deal with the lag.

Even for other games it could be a real pain. Reason is it is interface lag. You do something, like move the mouse, you have to wait until their server gets that processes it, and sends it back before you see the result. So even menus and such will lag. It is like display input lag, but worse and in fact cumulative.

So if you had a really slow ping, maybe it would work on. However most people aren't going to get that lucky. The cable modem and CMTS add about 20ms of latency right there, so that's as good as most consumers could ever hope for. DSL usually adds more like 30-50ms. That's just to get the your ISPs routers, of course. So unless the servers are at your ISP, it's gonna be more. That's also ping packets, which are small and thus have minimal latency. Real data packets take some time to transmit, increasing latency.

So wouldn't be hard to see 60-80ms to their server and that would be on the good side of things. Add in 20-30ms of monitor lag and you are over 100ms, which is easily perceptible to most people.

It's a neat idea, but I don't see it ever working out. They'd need servers at nearly every ISP and all over the nation, and people need higher BW connections before it is feasible to get better quality.

And for all that, a $100 graphics cards solves all those problems.
 
And for all that, a $100 graphics cards solves all those problems.

That's the thing: if they're not maxing out the settings and you're getting compression artifacts anyway @ 720p or less, yeah, a reasonable video card that probably comes with most new systems (unless you're using on-board video) anyway would work better.

Considering a computer is more than just a console-like game machine, reasonable ones can cost under $400 during the holidays. Sounds better than a $250 computer and paying subscription costs to play limited games in limited ways.
 
I was looking into this as well but quality certainly disappoints. Considering the fact that you pay a lot for each game plus service and not even get medium quality for each game is pretty lame. Considering the fact that it doesn't take much money to get a decent gaming rig these days, this really isn't impressive unless you're a Mac fanboy or really have the urge to play your games on iPhone or the like.
 
I've got a much better idea for a games service!

First of all you pay for the purchase of the game. then you make a text document of the level you want to play and what you want it played on. Like CRYSIS on ATI RaAaGEon and...6 core q9400. or something. And then you give a basic plot of what you want to happen! e.g.

"I go to the house where all the hardcore people lives and pwn their asses with dat tank! And then they go all crazy and I shoot them up with machinegun! all headshots!111"

Then this message is sent to the sever place. where they have all these hardcore players, who read the script, build the computer and act out all the roles in the clip. (they use your username for the main person and then names of famous games players or something). They record it on fraps/ camcorder (you get a choice of ikea furniture to use with the second option, eyefinity is an extra 3$)Then once completed they upload the video to your youtube account, so everyone can watch you pwn those people on your hardcore system!

This way you'd never have to own another computer ever again. But for only a monthly fee of 7.99$ every month and the cost of the game, you could still "play" these games in ultra definition with the highest settings imaginable, and noone would call your computer or your skills "fake and ghey".
 
OK, Don't do drugs kids.

Buy the game, pay the monthly service fee, get sub console level performance and IQ. For the laptop gamer on the go this might make sense. For everybody else it is either too expensive or too softcore.
 
That's the thing: if they're not maxing out the settings and you're getting compression artifacts anyway @ 720p or less, yeah, a reasonable video card that probably comes with most new systems (unless you're using on-board video) anyway would work better.

Considering a computer is more than just a console-like game machine, reasonable ones can cost under $400 during the holidays. Sounds better than a $250 computer and paying subscription costs to play limited games in limited ways.

Yep, always been one of my big issues with it (the inevitable lag is the other). I mean if they could truly offer the high end card experience on any computer, well ok that might be something people would be interested in. Let's face it, a 5870 is expensive. Add a quad on top of that and you are talking a good bit of cash for a high end gaming rig. For all that, you'll need to look at replacing the video card in a year or so to keep really high end, and the CPU in 2 probably.

Ok well I could see people paying for a service like this, even if you had to buy games. You pay them $100/year so that you don't have to spend $400+ on hardware a year. If you could get 1680x1050 high quality gaming might be worth it.

But this? Hell, midrange graphics easily out do this. As such it is just not worth the money. You aren't getting a high end experience, you are getting a mediocre experience and that is cheap to get locally, without the problems.
 
I was in the beta for it and there wasn't any *noticable* input lag. If all it's doing is sending mouse/keyboard input along the pipes, then a good ping should alleviate most of the input lag anyone is seeing. 20-40ms, I'd guess, is tolerable.

Dude...for an fps I can barely tolerate the average 30-40ms screen lag of my T260.
 
How many companies are or have moved over to consoles mainly because apparently piracy is so "rampant" on PC.

Do we even know? No we don't, some devs like Epic have claimed this as a strong point against the PC platform, however the audience for the consoles is inherently larger for big budget game titles so we'd expect a lot of developers moving to consoles naturally to earn more money. Piracy is really more of an excuse to leave the platform, the additional revenue from console sales completely overshadows even the most exeggerated claims of lost revenue to piracy.

I don't really see the point in the service, they don't run games maxed out which means actually the hardware they're using is pretty average, on top of this you have incredibly lossy compression, what you end up with is a game run in medium settings which looks like it's been streamed through youtube.

Work out the cost in bandwidth for a user who plays a lot of games and this cost alone is going to exceed the cost of a mid range graphics card pretty quickly. It's an impressive technology but it's a false economy, and it has some really big downsides to it. There is a very limited scope for the usefulness here, I think when you're forced to use things like a rubbish laptop it would shine, but as an actual replacement for a traditional gaming PC, no way in hell.
 
Do we even know? No we don't, some devs like Epic have claimed this as a strong point against the PC platform, however the audience for the consoles is inherently larger for big budget game titles so we'd expect a lot of developers moving to consoles naturally to earn more money. Piracy is really more of an excuse to leave the platform, the additional revenue from console sales completely overshadows even the most exeggerated claims of lost revenue to piracy.

Exactly, If piracy was such a huge turn off, why don't more developers develop exclusively for the ps3, (which is still mostly unpirated) instead of the xbox and wii that have the same or worse levels of piracy.
 
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