OnLive: The death of Minimum Requirements

This looks really interesting...

It's a long article, so I'll try to summarize here. Basically, some company is trying to setup a service where you only need the most basic components to play and let their own processors handle the job. This means you can play Crysis with max settings on a Macbook.

"The best part? It already has serious buy-in from major publishers, including EA, THQ, Codemasters, Ubisoft, Atari, Warner Bros., Take-Two, and Epic Games. Oh, and 2D Boy."

It looks like everyone's interested in this. It uses a subscriptions service and is in beta testing now. Man, I hope it works. I couldn't imagine being able to play Crysis on the best settings without some sort of Alienware-esque miracle machine dropping out of the sky on my head.

Which would likely kill me.

Might eat up so much bandwidth with so many people playing that the cable companys might rase their prices for bandwidth useage?  thats my only fear, sounds like A cool idea anyway.

Cool idea.

This... is made of win. I've been shying away from a few games because of my three-year-old GFX card, which is giving me indications it may need to be replaced soon... but this just might solve the whole problem.

I can't see the pictures. :(

ZippyTheSquirrel wrote:

I can't see the pictures.

Kybutra wrote:

ZippyTheSquirrel wrote:

I can't see the pictures.

ZippyTheSquirrel wrote:

I can't see the pictures. :(

Neither can I.

Yay I can't wait to play single-player games ... online ... because I can't play games without active broadband internet! Yay!

In the end, the more people get to play on that thing, the more they need to put money into servers and they have to keep upgrading them steadily to keep up with game developements. I can't see how they would benefit since server costs would be huge.

lol, I can see this already....  low cost to players the first few months then price skyrockets after players get hooked.

GoDGiVeR wrote:

Yay I can't wait to play single-player games ... online ... because I can't play games without active broadband internet! Yay!

In the end, the more people get to play on that thing, the more they need to put money into servers and they have to keep upgrading them steadily to keep up with game developements. I can't see how they would benefit since server costs would be huge.

According to this video, I think it might be much cheaper then you may think. He says that the way Onlive works is actually much more cost effective. For every server they have thats thousands of players/paying customers/subcribers. In other words they dont have to spend billions of dollars on deveoping, and manufactureing, shipping millions on consoles / hardware devices. Sure, there is the little doodad you hook up to your tv, but that thing is less complex then the cheapest cellphones out today (or even from a few years ago)

Yea they have to upgrade the servers eventually, but from what I understand, the servers they have are far far FAR more powerful then the best gaming rigs in homes today, so I'm betting it will be a while before things need to get upgraded, and by the time they do, they will probobly be swiming in great lakes of money.

And lets face it, anyone who isnt already connected with broadband internet is just behind the times this day and age. So if the fact you need the internet to play keeps anyone from hopping aboard, then that person probobly isnt much of a gamer anyway.

Now i'm gonna copy paste a post I wrote about this subject earlier, because I dont feel like typing it again. So forgive me if I repeat my self on any subject.

"This stuff is absolutely nuts. I heard about this yesterday, and at the time I told my self... whatever, that won work. But the video was very convincing. If this works... those guys are going to be extremely rich.

I have a feeling Onlive will be the catalyst to Microsoft's demise. I've never been a big apple fan, but I will agree that they are much better built computers... and I have often thought that if games were able to be played on macs (as well as they are played on PCs mind you) that PCs would start going the way of the dinosaur.

If Onlive proves capable of doing what they say it will do, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it will change the face of the earth. On the surface that sounds silly, I mean, so what... a lot more people will be able to play a lot more games a lot more often, how can that change the world. Just think about the people playing the games, not the fact that they are playing them.

I foresee 3 things happening if things go well for Onlive.

1. A lot more laptops are going to be sold
2. A lot more people are going to get higher speed internet
3. The price of both of those are going to go up, and people will still eat it up.

Speaking of price, thats a scary factor that still has not been unveiled. How much could they charge for this serive, and how much will games cost to rent/buy? Guess we will have to wait and see.

Also, planned launch for winter 09? I think the wii christmas streak is over, and in a few years, Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo are over as well. All this seems to good to be true. I guess the deciding factor will be just how many people that are STILL not connected to the internet will finally connect."

If any of the games require grinding levels count me out...  after the roller-coster ride with MXO and all the time it has comsumed over the years I will never waste my time ever again grinding A character.

Pictures above updated with newer better pics of the console and service description.

i think this can be great if its a sucsses it means more games can be run on a mac but i think the only thing that holds this back are ip caps i can see this eating alot of it.

letsrock wrote:

If any of the games require grinding levels count me out...  after the roller-coster ride with MXO and all the time it has comsumed over the years I will never waste my time ever again grinding A character.

Don't want an RPG game, don't get it, get a racing game, or a shoot-em-up, or an action-puzzler...

As for "Oh, they're gonna run out of bandwitdh really quickly," wouldn't they just buy more servers with all the people paying to play? Cuz, you know, that's, like, expansion, 'n' stuff, and they could totally afford it if it came to that. I hope they'll have a stress test in their Beta, though.

I don't want to pay a subscription fee to play games that aren't MMO's, especially when I would have to upgrade to a faster broadband connection just to use it. I don't want to play any of the latest games anyway, my PC can run any game I want to play (Again remember I have no interest in any of the latest games coming out) at quite reasonable specs, and it's considered 3rd-4th generation by now.

To me it doesn't seem like the kind of service I want, there will always be people who want to buy and build a custom PC that is top notch, and those people won't be interested in this service. While it might make high end gaming more accessible to some people I don't think it will revolutionise the market as we know it, there will always be people who want to play games on their own hardware.

but there are still thousands and thousands of people who cannot afford to spend £800 on a new rig to run it at max settings, maybe a rig to run it on reasonable settings, but to have it on max on your HD TV has its attractions

Blast proccessing is anti-consumer and a bad thing, but hey give up your rights to own the things you buy for shiney graphics. Because instead of saving up for that computer you want; you have to have those graphics RIGHT NOW and what's a little bit of personal freedom for graphics?

Mistakes wrote:

Blast proccessing is anti-consumer and a bad thing, but hey give up your rights to own the things you buy for shiney graphics. Because instead of saving up for that computer you want; you have to have those graphics RIGHT NOW and what's a little bit of personal freedom for graphics?

serious LOL is serious

This is the direction we'll be going in. Personally I don't think it's a good direction. I'd rather all my media was kept in one place so I know what Mistakes is on about when he says our rights, although I wouldn't put it so melodramatically.

It's going to be good for the little kiddies and the casual gamers as they no longer need to think. they just click, buy, play. and really it's a good idea for the most part but I'm worried about how this technology will be implemented in the future. It might not just be the death of Minimum requirements but it could be the death of PC's. 

If a game which requires huge amounts of input and output operations to be performed every second can be done across the world from the actual processing portion of the game then it has implications for the entirety of data storage. Soon we could be seeing (as just one possible outcome of course) the localization of all the data into one central point. At the moment computer power is progressing so far that it's becoming possible for one central database with a huge multilayered processor to power thousands of dumb terminals. We could potentially be looking at a future where we no longer know exactly where our data is being stored. You would sit infront of a dumb terminal which would be a computer which can perform input/output and send/recieve data through the internet. Then you would just login and have your files available to you on a server.

Everything then can be localized at one central point and then there's no limit to what the companies owning this system can do. They could charge a user a specific amount of money for each song you listen to, each time you listen to it for example.

Looking back over I maybe over dramatised this situation and maybe went a little off topic as well but I'm posting it anyway because it is one of the things that I feel is a possibility with increasing chance. Anyway to sum up (and to stay on topic) Do I think OnLive will be a success? No doubt in my mind. Do I think it's a good idea? Nope.

Hey not bad.

The way I see it is, if it turns out exactly how they want it to, that for a monthly price (hoping cheap) I am getting a bunch of triple A title games that I can play without updating my computer all of the time. I think it saves money in the long run...not sure though. Plus if you can rent the games and they are cheap...you are saving about 50 / 60 dollars a game if you beat them in about a week. Idk, maybe thats my crazy logic...