OnLive willl give you a free console if you buy a game
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
But just today I recognized it as a profound disruption: a service that isn't very good, with a cheaper business model, that targets non-consumption.
When the network does become good enough - and it's only getting faster - these guys will have encountered and solved all the myriad other technical problems (like iron man and altitude freeze). And they will also have solved all the problems with the business model (suppliers, charging, customer issues). It will be hard to catch them.
And... turns out people are saying the latency isn't actually as off-putting as you'd think, for FPS etc. I've heard a bigger problem is with mouse-pointers - the latency between the mouse moving and the pointer moving is apparently much more perceptible.
So, I say congratulations to these guys. Make a crap product for cheap; let everyone laugh at you; make it better. They are the visionary entrepreneurs, who actually change everything. No derision means no revolution.
OnLive does some spectacularly clever things to perform so well; and it will continue to deliver better and better experiences without you needing to upgrade your video card or computer.
I can't say more (disclosure: I'm under NDA), but OnLive is <i>definitely</i> the Real Deal.
True, they may not be there yet, but they most likely will.
Soon game devs can develop their games for idealized virtual environments which is much easier than developing for a video game console (or more than one console). If a dev needs features that a console doesn't provide, they can just 'host' it on a different data center.
The slow release cycle of consoles that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are basing their businesses on is about to be obsoleted and replaced with frequent software updates.
From here, it's only a small step to conceiving a world in which it is incredibly easy to build multiplayer games, too. If the whole simulation lives on the server and nowhere else, then you don't need any network code.
The OnLive team must be incredibly excited!
Soon game devs can develop their games for idealized hardware environments which is much easier than developing for the myriad of centralized mainframes. If a dev needs features that a mainframe couldn't provide, they can build the hardware that's needed.
The high cost of servers and bandwidth that Onlive are basing their businesses on is about to be obsoleted and replaced with dedicated rendering hardware for the consumer.
From here, it's only a small step to conceiving a world in which it is incredibly easy to build graphically intensive games, too. If the whole simulation lives on the one piece of hardware and nowhere else, then you don't need any network code or fancy servers or massive bandwidth.
I'm excited for the future console wars!
But I can't use the service because over 2 days I had used 40GB of my 65GB bandwidth (thanks Rogers). Although it's an extreme example, 3GB/hr is still too much for my capped internet service.
I am so very confused as to how this is scaling. Isn't the rule of thumb for scalability and performance to move client state and UI processing onto the client? Are they going to run an XBox VM for every simultaneously connected customer? How does it perform for games that require low controller lag, like FPS - or Megaman for that matter.
On top of that, they shoulder the cost of upgrading the hardware, along with the risk - another Dreamcast (high initial sales followed by a severe dropoff) would be disastrous. I'm not sure how they can pass those costs on to their customers at a price point that's attractive to anyone who doesn't play lots of games per month (also making it possibly a net loss), or that's competitive with the more scalable, more performant, and lower risk model of running the games on the client, whether it's a console or a PC.
Then, for say, casual gamers, you have excess client capacity (capital) sitting idle more than 95% of the time.
Given the complaints about always on Internet DRM schemes, there's bound to be some problems I don't want to deal with for Onlive.
The first SaaS applications were horrible to use and it has taken 10 years until webapps have arrived at desktop performance (as far as responsiveness goes).
If there was ever a business that got attracting customers and rewarding early adopters, it's OnLive.
Edit: This might have been an instant buy for me. Except I can't figure out how to pre-order their damn game, so now I've lost interest. There's no way to even search for games. Its like no one actually sat down with a credit card and walked through the "We Like Money" part of this whole operation.
I followed the same hopeless loop you did, and lost interest as well.
It may be possible to pre-order the game through the .exe they want you to install, but I've only got a Mac and a Linux box at home, and a Mac at work. It's not really worth my time to hunt down a PC just to participate in this offer.
As a UX professional, things like this make me die a little inside.
I'd worked on tech like this before, but never got acceptable performance, so I'd be curious how well theirs work, if I could get it cheap.