The 2009 San Francisco GDC is hopping along right now. From what I’ve gathered, OnLive seems to be the only thing worth mentioning from a gaming perspective. OnLive is a “gaming system” with no system in it. It’s essentially a box that connects to a TV that allows you to connect to a real gaming PC. It’s the first “real” foray into server-side gaming. The reason I quote “real” is because the critics’ reception thereof is almost universally “Feh, that can’t possibly work.” Server-side gaming has been an idea that’s been kicked around for a little while now. Quake Live has been experimenting with this concept and it appears to be relatively successful, at least for a beta game with a limited number of users.
OnLive (Img obtained from: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10202688-235.html)
What server-side gaming is, if you are unfamiliar, is the answer to PC gaming’s primary problem–the gaming system itself. This problem is two-fold:
- Unlike consoles, games designed for PC must run on a swathe of different setups. The result is often an increased number of bugs and glitches.
- For the user, it is always an expensive uphill battle to maintain a machine capable of running the latest games; e.g., PCs must be upgraded often and usually at high cost.
Server-side gaming rectifies these problems by processing the game entirely on some external server somewhere while the video of your gameplay is streamed back to you. In OnLive’s case, you would buy the device, plug it into whatever has a screen, plug it into the Internet, choose the game you want to play, then you play. The novel thing is that you do not download the game, it stays located on the server you’re connected to. Through the magic of the intartubes, the server processes the input you make from your controller at home, then sends back the subsequent video.
The technologically savvy should be seeing some issues with this by now. The largest concern that has been raised so far is lag. The demonstration at GDC seemed to be fairly successful, but they were connecting to a server on the other side of a wall. Since your input must be sent through the intarwebs before it is processed, any lag that would normally be seen on a conventional online game will be effectively doubled. There’s no way around that. This problem could be reduced by maintaining a certain number of server farms. Of course, nobody is going to want to connect to a server on the other side of the country to play their game–lag could reach unplayable levels–so the farms will need to be distributed across the intended service area. And God forbid OnLive actually becomes successful (although I don’t think anyone honestly believes that will happen) because due to the retarded amounts of processing required, there would need to be a nearly inconceivable amount of servers–not an entirely impossible task for the likes of Google or some other Internet giant, but OnLive is being developed by a handful of fairly ugly men who apparently haven’t thought about releasing this device on a national scale.
Among calling it The Phantom 2.0, the folks on the Listen Up podcast theorized that OnLive’s sole purpose is to be bought out. And that’s the American Dream, isn’t it? Thinking up an idea that will never conceivably work and finding some unwitting investor to unload it on.
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Thanks for the comment. Knowing even one person appreciates my toils brightens my day. And now I can thank you and hopefully brighten your day. You see, I like to have a give-and-take like that.