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Comment by shurcooL | Hacker News Reader

OnLive had some of the best tech for cloud gaming that I've experienced, but it seems like they could not get it to take off (I'd say due to very limited game selection, nothing new coming).

Sony is clearly going to use the tech to improve their PlayStation Now remote play. And hopefully have better luck with it, since they have access to many new and old games.

The idea behind cloud gaming has many advantages, for things like instantly trying demos, to playing old school games that aren't even available on your platform, gaming on MacBook Airs, etc.

I was a huge fan of OnLive in the beginning, but given that the service was semi-dead the last few years (no new games), I hope its tech will be better utilized by Sony.

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I would agree their tech was AMAZING. Even on my rather not so hot charter cable and very outdated 6 year old laptop i was able to play their latest games. The problem was the connection. I could feel the lag. I really tried to make it work but the lag was just to much. It wasn't onlive's fault. the ping time was just to much.

> I could feel the lag

That's exactly the problem. If the "ping" to the datacenter is too high, the gaming experience will be not great (lags). As the mouse/keyboard/gamepad inputs have to do a round-trip to the datacenter that is more problematic than traditional multiplayer games. You need several data enters around the world, near the gamers. Even than it will be unsuitable for certain games like high speed multiplayer ego shooters (Counter Strike, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament '99) where even a minimal lag of a wireless mouse/keyboard is noticeable and wired gaming input devices are used.

So what I always found interesting was that they didn't use the ping to their advantage.

Most online games have the ping problem anyways. Imagine everything in a [] is in the same datacenter or house.

[client] ------ [game server] ------ [other_clients]

[client] ------ [onlive server - game server ] ------ [other_clients]

And it doesn't really matter how the other clients are connected, they could be using OnLive as well. This would work amazingly well for online shooters or MMOs.

yes, shooters with >70ms latency BEFORE data even starts going out of your box into the display, plus additional 20-50ms before keypresses are even registered on the game code running hardware is the way of the future

I actually wrote an article for Gamasutra about this when they were first launching: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaleBeermann/20090327/83618/G.... Still, when I first tried it in their demo booth I was really impressed. But the data center was only 60 miles away. As soon as you get too far from the data center, there are actual physical limitations of being able to accomplish this effectively.

I gave OnLive a try and was bewildered that I could play cutting-edge games on my Macbook Air.

unfortunately Time Warner Cable disagreed…

> The idea behind cloud gaming has many advantages

Some disadvantages also, as outlined by the FAQ answers in the linked article. Your ability to play games is at the mercy of the company continuing to exist, and if it decides to shut down or merge for any reason, your games and saved games might just be deleted with no ability to export.

>OnLive had some of the best tech for cloud gaming that I've experienced

and it was still NOT GOOD ENOUGH for current state of the internet (latency)

>The idea behind cloud gaming has many advantages

like being a slave to content owners, borrowing for the rest of your life

If you can't afford to buy, renting is better than nothing.

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