OnLive says 'at least 5 years' for cloud to go mainstream
OnLive's John Spinale says it will take "at least five years" before cloud gaming becomes the primary way players consume games.
Analysts and soothsayers agree that technology is progressively moving towards the cloud, and that includes games. OnLive is getting started early, but perhaps a little too early. At the UK launch event, VP of games and media John Spinale said it will be "at least five years" before cloud gaming overtakes the traditional market.
"For us to get a majority as a genre of gaming platform it's going to take one whole cycle for that to happen [sic]," Spinale told CVG. "Whether that's everyone retiring their existing consoles or having their PCs be really underpowered... it'll be at least five years before we see this as a majority."
But even after his 5-year prediction is up, Spinale doesn't think traditional consoles and PC gaming will go away. They'll just adopt a new delivery method. "I don't think consoles are going away any time soon and I don't think existing PCs are going away either," he said. "I think the opportunity is that over time this architecture makes sense.
"As my PC dies the question I have is 'do I want to buy another one with a higher end system, or is it time for me to upgrade my graphics card or not?' Those are the times when we start to come into play as a real meaningful decision and take market share. Right now from a convenience perspective this is easy, frictionless and we're getting lots and lots of people that appreciate the value of immediate supportability."
OnLive has been a moderate success so far, brokering deals with games like Red Faction: Armageddon and Duke Nukem Forever to get the free MicroConsole into homes. Some of these deals have been more successful than others, but at the very least there seems to be some interest in adopting the OnLive technology. The company is reportedly in talks with Sony, Microsoft, and Valve.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, OnLive says 'at least 5 years' for cloud to go mainstream.
OnLive's John Spinale says it will take "at least five years" before cloud gaming becomes the primary way players consume games.-
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Agreed!
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'Cloud' is the new marketing buzzword. Have you ever used online gaming services that allow you to play from a cloud? There is a little thing called latency and having to send all your input to a server, which then sends it back to you causes quite a bit of lag, putting aside all your hardware. That and they have to use compression to save bandwidth, which makes most graphically intensive games look like crap.
This is just the new 'pc gaming is dying'.-
Cloud pretty much perfectly describes what OnLive is. Dynamically allocated resources at multiple offsite locations for thin client type computing.
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I think they used to call that a mainframe.
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mainframes generally don't dynamically spin up new instances of hardware across the globe to deal with spikes in demand and charge you appropriately per CPU cycle
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generally
And regardless, those services have not been available at consumer prices available to anyone who wants to run a website, service, mobile app, or whatever else. But keep railing against a word.-
I'm not railing against it, I wasjust trying to point out that the only thing new about the "cloud" is the name :)
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no, it's completely different because as a 1 man shop/small business/startup there's no chance in hell I can afford or justify the cost of a mainframe like that. So when my site/app gets linked on reddit/digg/whatever and comes crashing down due to the load I have no recourse. I either have to buy a bunch of hardware that will go unused except when my usage spikes, or I have to buy the right amount of hardware for my general user count and suffer downtime during spikes. Now I have a choice of things like Azure, GAE, Amazon's services, etc. The reason 'slashdot'd' and whatever became a phrase was exactly because the average website/app owner had no way to easily pay per cycle/machine/etc so that usage spikes didn't cause their service to die.
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As the internet pipes getting better and things become less IO bound, companies at ALL levels will move things back server side. This is not about gaming. This about computing which moves in cycles, gaming comes along for the ride whether it likes it or not. The terminology and the underlying tech that makes it all work changes but the concepts are the same. They merely come and go, ebb and flow.
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The internet connections might be getting faster and lower latency but they are also being burdened by bandwidth caps.
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2015: Year of the PS3: http://yearoftheps3.info/ (an Idle Thumbs joke)
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and selling in even smaller quantities
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in five years desktops will be faster than the fastest mainframe available now. within 6 years these computers will outpace the human mind. when that happens computers will be able to design computers better than humans can. an exponential effect forms; each computer generation becoming more intelligent and making ever faster and smarter computers. within 7 years computers will be so far beyond baseline humans it would be like comparing humans to earthworms. as the process escalates society will start to become strange, no longer concerned with the material world and will transcend into the next step: godhood.
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I had to look up what OnLive was.
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is that supposed to mean something other than you don't follow the games industry all that closely?
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What I mean is they haven't done anything substantial and the "cloud" is just another buzzword.
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What the...
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You don't follow the games industry. That's ok.
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Seems ambitious.
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In at least five years, smartphones will be powering games that look better than the current gen consoles. I think it's more likely that people will dock their phones to their TV and play like that than cloud gaming taking over.
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In regards to the "people don't want to buy expensive hardware to play games" argument, anyway.
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If I remember correctly, it was ze Carmack who made some good points about this in some interview. Say OnLive has a data center close to your location and you have a proper internet connection, we're talking 1-10ms ping times. Your average LCD display/TV has input lag of 15ms or more. (the numbers in the specs and the real world, measured numbers, not surprisingly rarely match)
So, in short, while yes, streaming does mean some delay, it really doesn't mean an amount of it that'd be an issue for your average gamer, or even noticeable. Right now, judging by everything I've heard about OnLive, it is noticeable, but the technology is there to make it better.-
so it might work in a perfect world.
if you have the average ISP (with time-warner i ping 40-50ms with local TF2 servers) and if you don't happen to live next to an onlive data center and you try to connect to a game across the country for a shackbattle?
i can't see it working very well, but i'm willing to give it a trial if onlive really picks up momentum.-
I think it might work in "this world". Yes, we would need, on average, better Internet connections, OnLive would need a lot of data centers, etc, but it's really not science fiction in any way, just a matter of progress and infrastructure improvements. If I play on a Finnish TF2 server, I can easily hit sub-10ms ping times. Server browser or score list might not show this, but we're talking about the "real network delay" here, whatever effects the TF2 client/server has on the ping is besides the point. But then again, as far as I know and have read, the network infrastructure over here is better performing, relatively speaking to amount of users of course.
Too bad the progress seems to be going in the wrong direction over there right now, with ISP's trying to cut down bandwidth usage instead of investing into a more capable infrastructure.-
I just don't like to introduce more latency into the system. I always strive to minimize it: 120hz monitor, corded mouse, PS/2 keyboard, and enough hardware to run games locally. I am good at consciously noticing less than optimal performance, but I don't count on that ability to detect everything that worsens the experience. "What you don't know doesn't hurt you" is false.
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I don't disagree with this at all. I very much dislike input lag and every gaming related purchase I've made has been made with latency in mind. I'm just saying that when people refer to network delay as some sort of unsolvable problem as far as streamed gaming goes, they're wrong. It'll take resources and time to get that delay down to say 10 or 5ms, but when it's there, it really won't be noticeable to many, and significant to very few or none.
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But who would spend the money to upgrade the infrastructure to reduce latency? The majority of Internet users don't notice 200ms lag when checking email or facebooking so I don't see a real demand to ever make it better than it is. Even if a competing ISP tried to make their network lower latency I don't that it would really be a selling point to most people. Also there is not much competition in the markets now anyway with people only having the choice of one cable ISP and one dsl ISP. I don't see latency improving in the next decade. It's not that it is insolvable, it's just there is no money in solving it.
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Not sure about this taking off anymore, just got a notice from Cox Cable that I now have a data cap.
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