OnLive shuts down streaming games service, sells patents to Sony | Hacker News Reader

OnLive shuts down streaming games service, sells patents to Sony

arstechnica.com

62 pointsprostoalex35 comments

"The service and a $100 microconsole launched in late 2010, but suffered from noticeable latency and image quality issues in our initial tests."

Did anyone expect differently?

Heck, I expect this would present significant challenges even running on a LAN

It's not a matter of technology, it's a matter of physical impossibility.

I can ping google with 5ms latency. That's for the usual ping size packet, allows for 200 round-trips per second.

Do you really expect to push inputs and get streamed video back (and encode and decode said video, which also takes time) with any kind of reasonable response time?

I've actually tried OnLive, and in less than ideal circumstances. I was amazed by how good it actually was, even with RTT for 120ms. Some games, like rally games didn't suffer that badly from the added latency.

For things like first person shooters it didn't work that well, the latency and input lag was very noticeable. But get that down to a RTT of 20-30ms then I'm sure most casual gamers will hardly notice.

The encoding and decoding is done in hardware and is negligible at best. Also something to keep in mind is that kids today are used to input lag. Both PS4 and Xbox One uses wireless controllers.

> Also something to keep in mind is that kids today are used to input lag. Both PS4 and Xbox One uses wireless controllers.

The input "lag" with wireless controllers is not in any way comparable to the lag introduced by streaming your game over the internet. For example, tests have shown that my current wireless mouse — the Logitech G602 — has no more latency than a wired mouse. (The range is crap, but that's another issue.) Nor have I had any latency issues using my Logitech F710 gamepad, even with high octane games like Super Meat Boy.

Could you link to some of those tests? I'm finding it a little hard to believe, just with the amount of noise that is on the frequencies used.

Unfortunately, it's hard for me to find now since I bought the mouse years ago. But it has a dedicated receiver and a 500hz polling rate with a reported 2ms latency. Having to be no more than a few feet away from the receiver probably helps. (In my experience, it just sporadically stops working once the mouse gets too far away instead of introducing lag.) And again, with the previous generation of Logitech's wireless gamepad, I was able to complete Super Meat Boy 100% with no issues at all. Good luck doing that with any degree of latency!

(I've noticed that Bluetooth tends to be significantly more laggy, but that might just be confirmation bias.)

> The encoding and decoding is done in hardware and is negligible at best.

The CPU usage may be negligible, but not the latency. If you live on a place that still has Analog and Digital TV you can flip between both channels and see what's the delay between them. I've seen it being around 0.5s, maybe more, maybe less (Satellite TV is even worse, of course)

I can only speak from personal experience, but the latency added by encoding and decoding has had to be negligible, as we already had a really high RTT.

And TV's are hardly anything to benchmark against. They are designed to be cheap, and I'm sure most of them do it in software as well, as it's way cheaper. Nobody notices a 300ms latency in the image, as they don't have any inputs to measure it against.

I actually finished Red Faction Guerrilla on OnLive, and other than the screen getting blurry at times when they downsampled the image, it was hardly noticeable that I was streaming the game. I mean, of course I knew that I was, but I didn't care too much.

Honestly, 120ms is certainly not all that bad. I grew up in the sub continent playing Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike at ~100ms and it wasn't half bad. Sure, the latency is there but it takes only a short period to get used to it.

It's a little different in this case, with OnLive the latency is also added to inputs. With games like CS and UT things are calculated on the client. Incidentally this is also why cheating is relatively easy: You have to trust the clients.

>> It's not a matter of technology, it's a matter of physical impossibility.

I would say (and I've been saying this all along) is that it's first and foremost a matter of economic impossibility.

Under the assumption that you can make the technology work well enough for a sufficiently large group of potential customers, the business case for streaming games simply doesn't make sense to me. You need to invest huge amounts of money to build, maintain, and update (keep current) highly-specialized server farms that are mostly useless for other purposes, in the hopes that people will pay money to play games on them. All while hardware prices keep going down, and game visuals (including resolution and GPU requirements) keep going up. If you stop upgrading your server farms, within a year or 2 what would previously be top-of-the-line hardware will be so cheap (new in the case of PC's or second-hand in the case of consoles), that unless you are dead set on being able to play the same games no matter your physical location, you can get a much better experience for less money by just buying the hardware.

It has always occurred to me that many people are still convinced cloud gaming is a good idea, but the repeated failures of services like OnLive seem to have proven this wrong for now...

I think the anti-piracy angle is what attracts the game industry. Sony probably envisions a future where GTA XXV is released exclusively as a streaming service. Such a DRM-system would be practically uncrackable (unless you hacked the server or the server code was leaked). Customers would have no say in the matter. This is the main reason why the industry promotes consoles so much. Red dead redemption was never released to PC even though i am sure a lot of PC gamers would want it.

Not to mention there are whole classes of games where the latency is less of an issue (RTS, board/card games, etc).

There's a number of products that do this already. Sony even has an division named Gaikai centered around doing this (which is where those patents are probably wanted).

- Playstation Now lets users play PS3 games on their PS4 in a similar fashion (games run remotely)

- The PS4 lets you "remote play" using a PS Vita (your handheld to your console, remotely)

- The Wii U streams content to the controller with remote play (this is different than the PS4 however, it is local only).

- Steam allows you to stream games from one computer to another

IIRC the new Dragon Quest game does "cloud gaming" in this manner as well.

OnLive was good. I also thought the latency would be a blocker, but it really did just work. The problem for me was that I didn't want to stream PC games - I had a PC right there, so why bother? Now, if I could stream console games to my laptop (without owning a console) - sign me up!

You know, I was typing out a summation to show you that the latencies would only cause a frame or two of lag at 60 fps, but it's a lot easier if you just go try it yourself.

Go download Steam on 2 computers, find a free demo or something, and turn on the In-home streaming feature. Press F6 to see the latency chart. Now add your 5ms input lag and a 10ms video serialization lag. The rest of the technology stack is pretty much the same.

With my NVidia graphics card encoding and my Haswell GPU laptop decoding, the lag at home over wifi is only 12ms.

It's definitely not a "physical impossibility" to do this over the internet if your ping is 5ms.

> if your ping is 5ms.

Who the hell has a 5ms ping? Most home connections are DSL or coax, both adding lots of overhead and latency. DSL/VDSL is especially bad. My u-verse ping to the nearest cdn mirror was something like 20-25ms. My work comcast is slightly better with a 10-12ms to a local cdn. When I had residential comcast, I had probably double that. And that's ignoring all the overhead Onlive puts in.

Sadly, onlive would probably clean house in the age of to the home fiber. Maybe 5 or so years from now that service would be more common, at least for gamers. This, of course, means that Onlive would have to deploy servers to every 5-10ms distance. So your typical metro region would be broken down into a few dozen zones, each with its own onlive server, game library, etc. It sounds like a cost nightmare.

I think the onlive guys said that 50-150ms is doable for most games and sold a service that worked well with non-FPS games. The problem is, gamers are FPS obsessed and that level of latency is a killer. That's on top with games being cheaper than ever. A plain-jane PC can get on Steam and buy on-sale games for next to nothing.

> The problem is, gamers are FPS obsessed and that level of latency is a killer.

Console games typically have a minimum possible input lag of 60ms, and once you add in the controller response time, TV refresh rate, and the design of the game's engine, it's common to have 100ms or higher. For example Destiny on PS4 has a minimum input latency of 100ms ( http://www.displaylag.com/destiny-lag-factor-review/ )

Point is, consistent input latency is much less noticeable than people seem to think. When people complain about lag they're usually complaining about spikey/inconsistent lag. Consistent 150ms is not a killer. There are billion dollar games that have shipped with worse.

I think the problem is that if I'm playing a FPS on Onlive and playing against you, say in Counter-Strike, and I have an extra 150-200ms lag and you don't, then I lose. Coop and multi-player play in Onlive sounds terrible.

For single player games, yeah, you're right, a person can handle 100ms or so, but that's mostly because he isn't playing against anyone else and the game is designed to handle 100-150ms delay. It can handle an extra 100ms or so from Onlive without too many issues. Its not pretty, but it works well enough.

I do agree that spikes and lost packets are the most noticeable issue, but even if you eliminate or minimize those, you still have the coop delay problem.

Ideally they would only group Onlive players with other Onlive players. Just like it's very rare to have console users playing with PC users, because the console players get slaughtered.

You can cache the rendering logic on a local peripheral or computer, and then only send the data changes. Last I checked, when call of duty is played on Xbox, it only requires streaming rates of ~2mbps because the actual data in transit is relatively minimal. Of course, "caching the rendering logic" on a peripheral is not easily done when it's meant to render on a high performance local machine, but I would guess a lot of optimization tricks are available. Also when OnLive launched graphics cards were more expensive and less powerful. It may now be possible to get a lot done with a <$100 device.

It's good-enough for less intensive / movement-oriented games. Not that that covers much of what people actually want to play, mind.

Also some people are just not that sensitive-to or bothered-by bad quality media that the pickier amongst us would consider non-starters. e.g. there are plenty of people walking around noisy streets enjoying their music via earbuds that don't deserve to be free gift with a Happy Meal.

Yes, but they're hearing music as an afterthought in this case.

Of course there are games in this category: those on a mobile phone/Portable systems.

But their sales point is: "leasing games and equipment", however, if I'm doing this I expect good/high quality (like going into a LAN Gaming center)

I agree low quality is acceptable in a multitude of cases, but it doesn't fit with their product.

Back in the early days of recorded gameplay there was a massive influx of gaming VODs to Vimeo, because they were basically the only mainstream video hosting site that had good enough quality. Iirc Vimeo even had to ban gameplay videos.

Many games were not viable on OnLive, some because of latency and some because of fuzzy image quality. It was a good service for the super-casual gamer. But those all play games on their phones now.

I played FPS games with this service with no real issues.

Latency is low enough that nobody cares about making it faster. I was at a awesome ISP 10 years ago playing quake with < 10ms ping (through clever routing to certain servers). This is still unmatched, I would say that latency and connection quality actually decreased. Fluent "live" interaction over the internet is still decades away.

I mean, it's not decades away...

If you want < 10ms ping, you need to:

1) Be within 10ms of target datacenter (1,860 miles roughly)

2) rip out the TCP/IP handlers in all of the hardware along the route and replace with highly optimized, workload specific IP handlers (you'll want to do this in the kernel, OR in an ASIC if you're really serious about speed).

3) own all of the fiber along the route.

Basically, if you can eliminate all of the finger pointing and just own the network end to end, you could probably implement this today, it's just that no one is at that scale except for maybe Google (note: I have no idea how Google runs their internal network, but if I had to guess, this is probably what they're doing).

Edit: You can get this now, it's just hard and not worth the cost or effort to do (since no one will bear the cost of building a network like this for gaming, or really for any application I can think of... there just isn't a need for this kind of network performance).

Playing Quake on a "real" local client with input handling and extrapolation done locally is not necessarily the same as playing OnLive where your input is sent off for processing and the resulting video is returned.

I haven't tried OnLive, but the scenarios are very different so I don't think the comparison makes sense.

I've been playing Tribes Ascend with a ping of 3-5ms ever since I started playing it. I'm in the Netherlands and the game servers are in Amsterdam so that helps, but to say it's unmatched is not true.

I play CS:Go on my home Comcast connection, and on certain servers (and time of day) I will have 5 - 8 ms ping due to their location. It's awesome to have such low ping times.

Looks like Sony making a sidebet on the death of traditional consoles to me. If PC's effectively take over the console space then Microsoft is fine since they have the pre-eminent pc gaming OS. Sony on the otherhand doesn't, so I'm guessing they're investigating game streaming as an alternative and buying up IP to do it.

Damn. I've got two games I rather wanted to finish playing.

Leaving my lack of ability to finish games to one side - I wonder how dangerous the patents are? I imagine Sony's strategy is to limit game streaming to owners of their hardware. If they are aggressive with their IP that could leave the rest of us shut out of an entire delivery channel.

  Players who took part in that hybrid plan will still be able to play their 
  purchased games through Steam, but streaming games purchased through 
  Cloudlift or the older Playpass subscriptions will no longer be usable 
  after the end of the month.

You may still be able to finish them.

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