OnLive Talk

OnLive Has Many Doubters

Posted on 29. Mar, 2009 by admin in Hardware, News & Articles

If OnLive actually works, it will really revolutionize the gaming industry and completely change the way that people play and purchase games. The OnLive service is so different because it uses “The Cloud” instead of having gamers buy a physical game console. “The Cloud” is basically a fancy name for a large network of servers. I don’t want to confuse everyone with technically how it all works, but basically instead of your game running on your game console or PC, it is running in a data center miles and miles away from your house. 

Because OnLive is so different and revolutionary, there are naturally many skeptics that don’t believe it will actually work. The skeptics and doubters main concern seem to be about lag. The way that this service is setup is when you press a button on your controller, that information has to be sent to the data center, the server running your game has to apply your input to the game, and then it has to send the video all the way back to your house. This entire process has to be done in less than one second, otherwise there will be noticeable lag and it won’t be very enjoyable.

During the presentation at GDC it was mentioned several times that there would be no noticeable lag and that the gamer would not be able to tell that the game was running in a data center somewhere. However, talk is often cheap, so we will just have to wait until OnLive is actually released to see how it actually performs. Until then, many will continue to have doubts about the service. 

Check out these articles that address the lag and similar issues:

Eurogamer.net -Why onlive cant possibly work

Palgn.com.au – OnLive – Fact or Fiction?

Gamasutra.com – Games as a Service – Why Im Skeptical of OnLive

Joystiq.com – onlive-bosses-talk-bandwidth-caps/

Tags: bandwidth, onlive doubts