OnLive Game Streaming Service Impressions

and the results were.. lol

read the article, duh

doesnt say anything except what they did and what not nutin about results... and were we can see the results..

»www.joystiq.com/2009/06/ ··· ontinued

now thats what I was hoping for a good link! thanks!

The "good link" was in Karl's news article.

These types of ideas, and other future ideas, where consumers access data that is stored offsite in large databases/servers, are all doomed if ISP's low capping/high overage charges becomes the norm.

Exactly! We can get excited all we want but these services will NEVER be part of the internet. Caps will send the web back to the 90's and services like these will never be able to exist. Everything from games to holographic teleconferencing will NEVER happen because of caps.

Between caps and you having to live with in a 1,000 feet of service. Yeah it will be tanking real fast.

MILES, not feet. Over 1000 miles the latency probably starts getting excessive and throughput unstable.

That's 1000 MILES. Big difference.

Wow... so just playing the game for a few hours a day will completly throw you out of TW's 4GB "every user in the world besides people that actually use the interinet! uses less then 4GB per month" cap...

40 GB, not 4. Though you're right, internet usage will be crazy on this thing. Though where did you get the 5 Mbit number from? Around here the basic cable connections are 768k, and in other places they're 1.5. There is a $35 tier here that is 5 Mbit (used to be the $40 tier performance-wise...$40 has moved up to 7/512 with PowerBoost) but it isn't the most basic one.

That's what I would wonder about.

If there is one in STL or Chicago, then I'd be golden. If the datacenter is located in NYC, then that would be near the 1,000 mile limit.

quote:

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The OnLive service will be hosted in five co-located North American data centres. Currently there are facilities in Santa Clara, CA and Virginia, and one being fitted out in Texas.[13] It is claimed users must be located within 1,000 miles of one of these to receive a high quality service.[14]

---

Obviously we'll be seeing a datacenter in California, Texas, Chicago, the northeast, and a fifth location.

Wonder if it did work completely as hoped, would MS/Sony/Nintendo join together in some unholy alliance to DDoS onlive's data centers? Or even join up with ISP's? Oh the horror!

man the day I could use this would be great....sick and tired of having to worry about disks.

I only use around 10 to 30 gb a month of usage so I am not worried about this..

I don't know what you guys are downloading but if you hit 250GB you have issues!

Ever heard of Steam?

yeah I use them for certain games if I want to as well....

But last time I checked steam was not mac friendly..

are wsus for an entire network?(that's 40-150 gigs)...as well as the regular e-mail? Also Microsoft has now pushed all of it's partners to you now have to download the software..they double the fee if you want discs. When windows 7 ships i'll probably bust that 250 cap between wsus and downloading the new isos.

I downloaded it twice and have a brother in law that downloads constantly and we have NEVER come close to that cap.

If you are getting to close to the cap, get business.

I still question what some people are downloading in order to get that high of usage. I mean that is a lot of downloading

Try DDOSing Akamai. Just try.

Why in god's name have these idiots designed an interactive game using a client/server architecture with a dumb client model? It seems as if they designed a bandwidth hogging application where the whole point of doing so was to just hog bandwidth.

Makes one wonder who these clowns really are fronting for - Google? Because it seems that the whole purpose is to make the ISPs look bad. It certainly has nothing to do with making a good gaming experience.

I think that the ISPs do quite a good job of making themselves look bad without any help from an outside source. That's some entertaining conspiracy talk though!

Well, no need to buy games. If there's no need to buy games, you don't need to worry about losing them, scratching them, lending them out, etc. Updating and patching will be done at the head end. Expansions and add-ons will be as well.

I'd say those things amount to making a gaming experience pretty good. As for bandwidth hogging - I don't think they're out to make ISPs look bad. Maybe this could be a good thing - if enough people get onto this and hit their caps earlier than normal, or if someones ISP is byte-billed, and enough people start complaining then perhaps byte-billing will go the way of dinosaurs.

(Not that I have anything against ISPs doing what they want and how they want -- they're their own business -- but if you don't listen to your customers, it'll only hurt your revenue.)

Want some cheese?

Get over it. The Internet has grown beyond checking e-mail.

OMG, maybe they're using bit torrent?!?!

Nooo not somebody coming up with an innovative product that uses existing infrastructure that is fully capable of handling it! How terrible!!

Umm...maybe because people don't have to upgrade their hardware anymore? If very high-speed broadband becomes ubiquitous like it has in Japan and South Korea, then you could presumably log onto any computer anywhere and play the latest high-resolution graphics-intensive games.

The ease of use accompanying this service, along with its slick and well-made AI and extra features, is making this look like a real success story.

I'm thinking the business model is like this:

You don't have to own any games or software, but you can jump in and play games and software for a fee. Like pay per use.

This would allow people to actually play around and try games before they buy (without pirating it) or if they play a game only occasionally they wouldn't have to own it at all.

They probably will have monthly subs that allow you to play any of their content. Think of it as Netflix for gaming. I could see the potential, but it would use a fair bit of bandwidth.

We got to attend the Onlive Site test as well. There are a few members at our Onlive Fans forum that did as well. You can read our review at our site if you wish.

So it sucks pretty much the entire 5mb of the connection's bandwidth. At that rate, you'll down about 4gb for every 2 hours of gaming. If you play 24 hours a month(6hrs/week) that'll be about 48gb for just Onlive. Most gamers I've seen usually play around 40 hours a month at least, which would take ~80gb. Hello bandwidth cap...350 miles is a very minimal distance. It would have been better if they had had their machine bank closer to their distance cap, like 800+ miles away. That would probably come close to demonstrating the average user's distance.Slightly sluggish at a mere 350 miles away. That means it would probably be a nightmare at a further distance. And what are the great graphic games that people's PCs aren't able to run that they want to play so bad and is subsequently the main selling point for this service? Oh that's right, shooters.Where was the multiplayer game server located? If it was sitting in the same datacenter with the Onlive server equipment, then this is not a real-world multiplayer experience.

In summary, Though the article is sparse on details we can conclude several things from the details that ARE there:

- This service will be a major bandwidth hog. So all people on ISPs with slower connections(WISPs, Most DSL connections) will have to stay away. Most of the ones who have fast enough connections will run into bandwidth caps and subsequently overage charges because their ISP is likely to be a cap nazi cableco. So it looks like the only winners in this area of users of FIOS.

- The main attraction, FPS games and other shooter types will fail miserably. The Onlive datacenter is likley to be far more than 350 miles away, causing horrendous button lag. To complicate matters, the actual game server for multiplayer games(such as Call of Duty) is likely to be in variable distant locations away from the datacenter the Onlive user is currently connected through. So that will add normal game lag on top of the button lag, making multiplayer in a shooter nigh unplayable. To even further complicate matters, these Olive users will likely be playing on servers where there are people with PCs playing. The Onlive users will be unable to react fast enough due to all the latency and subsequently be easy game for PC users. Shooters on Onlive will be a nightmare.

Other complications are likley to arrive when this thing hits the real world (not an engineered real world, which is what this test was in)

»garry.posterous.com/good ··· n-just-c

Google's servers aren't optimized for online gaming. And 700 ms? Who gets that? The dude needs to have his connection checked by his ISP.

Hey, thought I might mention that you guys might want to watch the last 10-15 minutes of the video. Someone directly at the end actually brings up the issues with capping (Kudos to them!) and the OnLive developers talk about it.

»www.youtube.com/watch?v= ··· g&fmt=18

I can't wait for Onlive to come out. It's going to be truly amazing!!
Jason - Onlive Forum

Your business plan is being pulled out from under you by cable companies dastardly plan to implement metered billing.

Make with the lobbying. You're going to have to spend your way out of the caps and meters.

Sincerely,
Your customers.