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[Chesire Cat]

Well simply put, it will be run on supercomputers with unique infrastructure designed to handle emulation of many many PC games at once. The only playerside requirement is a PC capable of decoding the encoded video on the fly and highspeed network connection.

The service itself is run by some pretty smart guys. And they know people wont pay more than $40/mo for something like this. It will probably be in the $30 range I would imagine.

[snalin]

If anyone can do anything like this, it's that group of people. Especially the guy that figured out QuickTime and WebTV, since that's technology that's fairly similar to this.

I don't know what all the hating is about. If they can pull something like this off, that's great for the gamers.

[est]

I can't see it affecting my game playing/buying/owning habits

[est]

Here is a thoroughly unsurprising writeup at Ars: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/01/onlive-demoed-lag-graphics-are-a-problem.ars

[Alex C]

I can't see it affecting my game playing/buying/owning habits

Same here. I can upgrade my own computer, and as it currently stands I don't actually need to spend money all that often just to enjoy PC gaming. If you absolutely MUST play something like Crysis when it first hits at high quality, yes, you will be spending an absolute shit ton of money. But that's late '90s 3dfx thinking, when it comes right down to it. Games like Crysis are a dying breed-- the GPU tech demo masquerading as the new standard has given way to the multi-platform release that caters to the lowest common hardware denominator. In my experience, people use that thing as a benchmarking tool in between rounds of TF2 and Modern Warfare 2. If you are willing to stay a half-step behind the latest console generation at launch day and avoid "enthusiast only" GPUs, the price of pc gaming lowers considerably. You may still spend more than with a console, but that's actually not such a bad trade when you consider just how much more flexible a PC is in general. And if such a service costs $30 a month or so, well, that's a problem for me, since I typically go two or three years between PC upgrades, and I usually spend less than $200 on the retrofit. This really hits me as something that's only of use to the highly casual PC user, the sort of person who owns a couple of consoles and has a laptop as opposed to a desktop. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, and I bet it's actually a pretty damn big market-- but it's still not one that I personally fit into.

[ackblom12]

Alright, I'm necroing this thread because I actually managed to get into the year beta and I thought I'd post my initial thoughts. Haven't messed around with it all that much just yet, but I will continue checking things out over the week.

So far the service actually works much better than I expected. command input lag is quite noticeable, and in a twitchy game I can see it absolutely murdering people, but in the games I've tested it with it works for the most part.

The graphics settings for games are pretty decent, not quite to the levels you could get with your own PC, but quite playable. The color seems just ever so slightly off to me on everything I've played. It feels slightly washed out if that makes any sense. Colors just don't seem as vibrant as they're supposed to be. I'm not sure if that's an actual issue or if I just have a terrible eye for color though.

Pricing is a goddamn crime on the service though. As we all know you have to subscribe to Onlive normally. In the beta it's a free year and if you get in you have the option of getting a second year for $4.95/month, not sure what the final sub pricing will be. The games are outrageously priced.

The pricing models I've seen thus far are FreePlay, you can play the game for as long as it's on the service, and then Rental, which is 3 - 5 days. Splinter Cell only has FreePlay and it is the full $60.

FUCK

THAT

SHIT

So yeah, this is only a beta, so there's not a massive number of people fucking with the servers just yet, but it's working out much much better than I had anticipated, but unless the pricing is made more reasonable, it's utter bullshit.

[Ytoabn]

Pricing is a goddamn crime on the service though. As we all know you have to subscribe to Onlive normally. In the beta it's a free year and if you get in you have the option of getting a second year for $4.95/month, not sure what the final sub pricing will be. The games are outrageously priced.

The pricing models I've seen thus far are FreePlay, you can play the game for as long as it's on the service, and then Rental, which is 3 - 5 days. Splinter Cell only has FreePlay and it the full $60.

FUCK

THAT

SHIT

BUAH HA HA HA HA HA. THAT's what they're trying to charge for this? I don't think they've quite caught on to what was supposed to be the main motivation to going to such a radically different system (IE, lowering costs). Yeah, we'll see if they improve once they're out of beta, but right now OnLive is just a laugh.

[est]

I thought the lower cost is more of a "you don't have to have a super good pc to run games" thing.  Like, that you could run it on anything that can play back the video stream for it, which isn't very taxing compared to running the games locally.

[ackblom12]

Yeah, it definitely doesn't undermine the whole point. This is more like paying the subscription to Netflix, then paying full price for a full season of a show and being told that the studio can pull it whenever they wish.

[JD]

So now Onlive is basically Steam