This won’t be as long a piece as this announcement deserves I’m afraid – I’m absolutely shattered, but I shall do my best to cover the bare bones of the story. You can read more about it here.
OnLive is a technology some seven years in the making that promises to do for gaming what cloud computing is doing for work and offices. The idea is simple, but already enough to get doubters complaining it will never work: in essence, instead of playing the game through your console or PC, you play it on a server many miles away, and a video feed comes back to your screen making it feel like it’s in the same room. If successful, it would mean that any PC – even several year old models – could run the latest games like Crysis with the top end graphic settings enabled, as all they would be doing is playing the video feed.
Just think of all the advantages: no more installation required, no more online cheaters, no more waiting to try demos, no more needing to upgrade, and most importantly for publishers: no more piracy. This is why OnLive has already attracted support from big names like EA, Epic and Take Two. No sign of Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony though – that’s to be expected from a box that could challenge their console share.
Because for what it is, OnLive is said to be very cheap indeed. It’ll be a subscription service that undercuts Xbox Live in terms of costs. All you’ll need is a computer or TV set and a broadband connection – 1.5mbps for Standard Definiton TVs and 5.5mbps for high definition. Can it be done? We’ll have to wait and see how it fares with millions of users, rather than the handful of beta testers but if it does, it will dramatically change the gaming landscape forever.
We’ll find out before the end of the year. Exciting times.
1 comment so far
1 Sarah Russel // Apr 2, 2009 at 3:07 pm
consoles – a thing of the past? surely not?!