Find GOD in the Clouds

No I haven’t gone all evangelical on you. A Games On Demand service has been launched in the US by OnLive; a company with a vision of a future that will see HD games being streamed to…well, pretty much anything you care to think of.

OnLive will eliminate the need for expensive hardware by streaming video games to your choice of media, be it a laptop, netbook or even your television. The cloud, a plethora of high powered servers, will deal with the nitty gritty of the games graphics and stream the resultant in-game action back to you in real time. OnLive are also offering a control pad and MicroConsole, similar to a SlingBox, which will link the service to your TV, doing away with the need for a console all together.

The current games available to play include Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins and Assassins Creed 2, so EA and Ubisoft clearly have their derrières firmly rooted to the bandwagon. OnLive is currently scheduled to make its debut in the UK in late 2011 by BT, who have a small stake in the company, so all’s well, that ends well. But before you abandon your consoles by the wayside, there’s just one more thing….yes, like Columbo, super detective extraordinaire, let’s take a closer look at this promise of a gamers arcadia…

Firstly, the choice of games will be limited dependant upon which games publishers elect to work with OnLive. In addition to EA and Ubisoft, Eidos, Atari, THQ, Take-Two and Codemasters have also counted themselves in, so thankfully we might all one day be able to play 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand via the Cloud. Hallelujah!

Secondly, problem number 2…It’s big. It is a number 2 of huge proportions. A number 2 that may well clog the U-bend of OnLive’s vision and turn their pipe dream into a messy nightmare. OnLive was successfully showcased at the 2009 Games Developers Conference in San Francisco. Word on the street is that the reaction times weren’t quite fast enough to satisfy everyone, which begs the question as to what sort of lag could be experienced when transitioning to a wider audience. The conference in San Francisco debuted servers running a handful of games at a time, but how will they cope in terms of resolution and speed, when faced with the immense volume of users that OnLive are aiming for? Then there’s the hardware perspective; to maintain a basic standard of quality as promised, a lot of high end hardware is going to be required to a low ratio of users. An increase in users would dictate a necessity for an increase in the amount of aforementioned expensive hardware in order to maintain a level of consistency with the service and presumably this cost is going to be passed onto the consumer via the subscription charge. So potentially we’re already looking at a fairly costly subscription when OnLive finally wings its way to the UK, which will factor in future expenses, as OnLive would surely have the business acumen to avoid a lower initial cost which would constantly have to be increased as they expand. This is not the way to win friends and influence people. Throw in the cost of the games and things are starting to look mighty expensive…perhaps a cheaper, more feasible alternative would be some sort of device you could purchase outright which had the facility to play any compatible video games you purchased and the only subscription charge applicable would be when playing with other people online…multiplayer gaming if you will. It could be called a PlayBox or XStation… alas, we can but dream…

Addressing the issue of performance and lag; apparently the slower reaction time is imperceptible. The norm is 35-40 milliseconds between pushing a button and watching the reaction occur on screen. This increases to 80 milliseconds with OnLive, due to the information being relayed to the server first and then back down the server again to your screen with the appropriate in game action. This can nonetheless cause problems based on your proximity to an OnLive data centre. There are (or soon will be) six OnLive data centres in the US. So if you were a user based anywhere outside of the US, you would have some serious problems in terms of game response as you wait for the input from the button you’ve just bashed to travel across the ocean, pop into the data centre, retrieve the relevant response and make its journey back to your screen. However, Steve Perlman, founder of OnLive, like some omniscient messiah, has pronounced that his critics are just plain ignorant and that the service will work. Well that’s my mind put to rest then…

It’s safe to assume that rolling out OnLive in the US is akin to a giant beta, as they haven’t announced any plans for overseas data centres at present. If their business model succeeds, perhaps global expansion will follow shortly afterwards.

This delay may be a costly one though, as Sony and Microsoft are already working on their own Cloud gaming services. Sony’s Remote Play utilises the PS3, thus eliminating the need for a subscription cost. As long as you have access to Wi-Fi, any PS3 game would be playable via your netbook or laptop for example. Microsoft’s contribution is Xbox Live. Following the announcement of the Windows Phone 7, the potential would be the capability to play your game of choice on your PC, Xbox and Windows Phone 7 but this would require the games to have been installed on all platforms first.

So apart from a handful of some rather daunting potential problems and the budding competition already snapping at it’s heels, OnLive, in all its glory, will be arriving at your doorsteps in 2011. I don’t know about you, but I might just be hiding behind the sofa when it comes a-knockin’…