Playing In The Clouds

Will Onlive Live Up To Its Expectations?

Imagine a great, new game has just been released and it has been getting rave reviews all over the internet.Your friends are playing it online and it's just the kind of game that you really like, but as it turns out, your PC's hardware does not quite meet the game's minimum system requirements.
The logical next step to take would be to either upgrade your system or forget about the game altogether.Keeping up with latest games and their exponentially increasing system requirements isn't something many of us can easily afford.You will most likely follow the latter route and choose to live without the game at least until your next upgrade cycle when the game will have become totally last year anyway.
But what if you did not need to worry about how much RAM that new first-person shooter needs or which version of Pixel Shaders that fight simulator requires
?What if all you needed to play the latest games were an internet connectio and a game controller?Say hello to OnLive, a cloud-based on demand video gaming service,announced at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) in March 2009,which could render expensive hunks of GPUs irrelevant.

The Concept

OnLive is an on-demand game distribution service that uses the internet to stream games directly to a user's PC, Macintosh or even television set, without the need for huge, super-heated graphic cards or expensive game consoles.Basically, it is not entirely dissimilar to watching a video on Youtube with high speed internet, except that the player is watching a game that he is playing with OnLive Controller.
"If you compress game data so much that it can be send instantaneously over the internet, then you no longer have to compute the data in a game machine,"Essentially, it doesn't not matter how powerful you even need a computer is or whether device can stream video you can play any game online at any time.OnLive plans to host the games from their high and servers, using proprietary patent-pending technology to stream out the encoded video and audio. Customers only need browser plugin, a micro-console and an internet connection that can handle the incoming video at least 1.5 Mbps for standard definition or 5 Mbps for high definition (HD) the kind of speeds that are beginning to be available in Pakistan.The company promises high quality graphics and no noticeable lag regardless of your computer's hardware.If that isn't impressive enough, think about the amount of processing that goes into rendering a modern 3D game, Consider the average cost of a good graphic card (150 to 200) US $, central processing unit (CPU), RAM, sound card, hard drive space, cooling and the electricity to power all of that.On the contrary,On Live promises to minimize that cost and move it up to the 'cloud' a fancy term used for remote computing on a data centre instead of on your local computer where it is cheaper and more efficient.

Too Good To Be True

It sounds almost too good to be true and most people would be tempted to dismiss the whole outfit as a silly little start-up looking for publicity by making outrageous claims.This attitude would be understandable, if it were not on OnLive Inc's executive team of noted industry professionals.Steve Perlman,the man behind WebTv and Apple's formidable Quick Time Format; Mike McGarvey, former CEO of Eidos Interactive; Tom Pacquin, one of the key developers of Netscape and founder of the Mozilla Foundation, John Spinale former director and executive producer at Activison; Paul Weinstein, executive VP of business development at MySQL; and Charlie Jablonski, winner of 4 Emmys for his work on the NBC broadcast of the Olympics.These are just some of the individuals who bring their creativity and experience of OnLive.
Furthermore, OnLive is backed by big name partners such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Eidos, Atari, Nvidia, Take-Two Interactive and THQ.Clearly, OnLive is on to something.'It took years literally working with each of these publishers," says Perlman."They have verified there are no smoke and mirrors; that the tech works in a normal home, the business model is viable, and the quality of the gameplay is as good as or better than a PC or console."
For Game publishers, the popularity and usage of Onlive means that they no longer have to worry about piracy.It also means access to a whole new market of gamers who are not willing to invest time or money to keep up with rapidly changing gaming hardware. Some of the games that are currently available on Onlive private beta are Crysis Warhead, F.E.A.R 2:Project Origin, Prince of Persia , Burnout Paradise and Major League Baseball 2K9 some of which are demonstrated on a MacBook Air at GDC 2009.
The Biggest Issue gnawing at OnLive's credibility is concerns of cost and gameplay experience.The principle behind the service is based on the premise that a game can be computed, encoded and then streamed over the internet is almost real time, with no noticeable lag, to customer as much as 2,400 kilometres away.Still, critics like Richard Leadbetter and Eurogamer.net argue that the requirement on OnLive's data centres will be phenomenally high

Will It Work?

The biggest question on everyone's mind right after pricing, which the company isn't discussing right now, is whether it will actually work. Perlman's outline of the technology during the demonstrations at GDC indicate that it very well could. Many technologists and enthusiasts would certainly like it work as advertised. Until the service is officially launched, however, all one can do is speculate. In addition to the latency issues and broadband requirements, there are also concerns of interrupted gameplay and saved game files. Those are issues that haven't been openly addressed by the start up and until they are no one can judge how well OnLive will perform
Much of the gaming industry is skeptical, and undertandably so. Besides the tehnical difficulties involved in running a processor-intensive ownership. Even though OnLive's business model hasn't been announced yet, it will most likely be subscription-based, which means that the player will be renting the game and not buying it. For many, the low cost of subscription will outweigh the benefit of actually owning a physical copy of the game, but for others, it might not.
Although the concerns most people have with the idea on OnLive's service are valid, so are the possible benefits both for gamers as well as Publishers. Playing anygame, anywhere, anytime is pretty much the holy grail of gaming if OnLive work as advertised, it will shake the gaming industry beyond recognition. Right now, it is highly doubtful that streaming games will completely replace the traditional gaming console. However, it is certainly not hard to imagine Microsoft interest and possibly even worry. There is even industry speculation as to whether there will even be a next generation of game consoles, with analysts predicting that new ones won't come out until at least 2013, if ever, given the costs and relatively low returns associated with producing console hardware.
If OnLive's data compression is up to the mark, it will change a lot of things, and not just the gaming industry. How long it takes for this kind of technology to trickle down to South Asian markets such as Pakistan's is difficult to say, but it would be safe to say that developement is increasing to note in terms of the technology involved and the impact it will have on the traditional video game industry.
From Castle Wolfenstein to Crysis, pixilated stick figures to near-artificial intelligence (AI), the gaming sector has come a long way. As could computing and networking technologies evolve and improve, it only seems natural to shed the need for more RAM and expesive graphics processin units.