I'm sorry but I'm very very sceptical about this. We are essentially talking about playing games over VNC.
OK, I exagerate but the video compression etc is going to have to be a magnitude or more better than anyone else has achieved and there are people out there who are no slouches at video compression.
I'm sure the demonstrations on a local LAN were great. Let's see it running over the net.
The only way I can see this working is if they persuade (say) cable companies to collocate servers at the exchange.
I don't believe that they would be foolish enough to believe full rendering can be done on servers - it's just not a feasible solution with todays technology unless you are emulating j2me or something.
Perhaps they have something more interesting than that, or there has been some other innovation. I will reserve judgement until the public internet based demo.
Of it's going to be cross-platform, about as far as they can go is to send polygon data for rendering locally. I'm still sceptical, but would of course love to be proved wrong.
Onlive's offering will be a combination of service and/or device with all the rendering happening on the servers. One key stumbling block for adoption will be ISP's, in an era where they're capping downloads.
That does sound pretty impressive - given the apparent importance of low lag in multiplayer FPS to the hardcore gaming community (of which I'm not part, so this is just hearsay), I'm not sure how easy it would be to convince hardcore gamers to move to the platform though. But then maybe they're not the target audience?
No game waits for the server to process movement commands before showing the player moving locally because the lag is unacceptable and that's just raw movement and game state data. With extra time for the compressed 'image' data you'd have a completely unacceptable experience. I think casual gamers would hate the experience just as much. The only game I can think of that would want good graphics but crap response would be a golf game.
They are way overselling it. It's simply not possible to do as well as a game running locally, as they claim (maybe in 7 more years...). But there's a continuum of playability, between ideal and unplayable. If there are other benefits (flexible, convenient, cheap), and there is an audience who is very happy with this tradeoff, then this possibly, maybe could be a disruptive innovation.
It's not going to take off with hardcore twitch FPS, so they seem to be targeting the wrong market (probably just for a more exciting demo). It's niche audience might be more like for the Wii: they don't care it's less powerful and not HD, but they like it because it's more fun (and cheaper). A similar story for casual games (whose success surprised some people). I'm not saying it will find a niche; just that it's possible. And then over time, latency improves, and they're ready for it.
The argument I've heard about coping with first day demand spikes is a bit silly. Of course it won't handle that - but it doesn't mean it's useless. What about all the other days? Demand spikes are a problem for physical distribution channels too.
A 640x480x16 bit frame buffer is 600k. At 30fps, that's 17,6 megabytes per second of data. And 640x480 is a ridiculously low resolution these days, and 30 fps isn't so hot, either.
There would have to be some amazing compression for this to make sense, or a VERY fat pipe.
OK, I exagerate but the video compression etc is going to have to be a magnitude or more better than anyone else has achieved and there are people out there who are no slouches at video compression.
I'm sure the demonstrations on a local LAN were great. Let's see it running over the net.
The only way I can see this working is if they persuade (say) cable companies to collocate servers at the exchange.