One of the bigger stories this past week was OnLive heading to the UK. The service promises to make PC gaming more accessible by hosting all of the hardware—you simply supply a broadband connection and a Web browser, and you’ll be playing the likes of Mass Effect 2 in no time. If it works as described, great. There’s nothing wrong with exposing PC gaming to more people. → Read More
OnLive, the streaming video game service that threatens to change the way people perceive gaming, has signed a deal with with British Telecommunications. The deal means that Britons will be able to play games like Mass Effect 2 and Assassin’s Creed II over their broadband connection (and it also means that BT will buy a small stake in the company). No UK launch date has been announced. The U.S. launch is still on schedule for June 17. → Read More
During the GamesBeat keynote at GDC today, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman took the stage to showcase the company’s game streaming technology, which allows gamers to play high quality 3D games without a console — OnLive does all of the intense rendering in the cloud, then streams it back to a lightweight client that will work on nearly any computer (it will work on TVs as well with an adapter). We’ve been hearing about the service for quite a while now (as well as its competitor, OTOY), but now OnLive finally has a solid release date: June 17, 2010. At launch, the service will be available in the 48 contiguous states.
The service will have a $14.95 per month base service fee, and then users will purchase games and rentals on an a la carte model on top of that. You’ll be able to purchase multiple months at a time to get a discount on the service. As a special for early users, OnLive is going to waive the service fee for three months for the first 25,000 users to pre-register at this page. → Read More
There are people beta testing OnLive out there, and of course after our various looks at the remote gaming service (and my repeated statements of skepticism) we try to keep up to date. PC Perspective has a nice, lengthy write-up of the beta, which you should read in its entirety if you’re particularly interested. However, the reduction of PC Per’s sauce is this: for certain games, and for certain gamers, it may just be a good solution. But for power players it just isn’t an option. → Read More
You remember OnLive. The service, which lets you play any game remotely on a distant server, has produced much skepticism and much interest, and is now in public beta. We got a good look at it back in March when we were at GDC, and it appears that things are much the same. However, the combination of crowd noise and my bad playing made for a less-than-optimal viewing experience. This video is much clearer and much longer (it’s essentially a guest lecture at Columbia), so if you’re still interested in the OnLive thing, it may be for you.
This video deals with some of the technical issues that have been brought up. I haven’t watched the whole thing (skipped around to get the interesting bits) but he does address some of the compression and packet loss issues they have to deal with. → Read More
Slingbox owners love their devices. They allow you to watch your home television content anywhere you are in the world with an Internet connection. A new startup, Spawn Labs, launching today at TechCrunch50 wants to extend that concept to video games.
But Spawn Labs offering is actually a bit more robust because it includes a social element as well. A key part to playing video games is playing them against other people. And with the Spawn HD Pro appliance, you’ll be able to do just that. Say a friend has an Xbox 360 in California and wants to play a game against you, but you’re in New York. From New York, you would simply install the Spawn Player application on your computer, and you could remotely connect to their system, to play a game. → Read More
Cast your memory back to late March of this year and you may recall news of an on-demand, internet-based gaming service called OnLive (here’s the original post). Think of it like GameTap (remember GameTap?) except that nothing actually gets installed on your computer. All the games can apparently be streamed at up to 720p resolution over a 5Mbps connection, or standard definition over a 1.5Mbps connection. → Read More
When we first looked at OTOY about a year ago, the small company was trying to deliver a server-side 3D rendering technology that could allow modern video games to be played on basically any client. A lofty goal, for sure. Then OnLive was unveiled in March at GDC, and it sent ripples around much of the gaming world with a similar concept of cloud-based gaming (both good and bad). But OTOY believes it has a more lightweight and elegant way to do things, that is also more extensible. And it has a couple of key partnerships to prove it: EA and AMD.
Let’s run through some of the details quickly: OTOY is 100% browser-based, and works is all modern web browsers. All it requires is a broadband connection, and that will give you 720p (HD) graphics, with no plugins and no downloads. There is also a way to get 1080p graphics, though that’s a bit more intensive, obviously. But they key is that this is all done on OTOY’s servers and transmitted down from the cloud to run on whatever client you want, basically instantaneously. → Read More
We just tried out OnLive, and of course it worked perfectly, being a demonstration on the order of 8-10 machines set up by the company itself. The people we talked to were naturally very optimistic, and my concerns over the availability and reliability of multi-megabit connections were waved away. That isn’t the only problem, though. OnLive will need a top-tier computer for every player at all times, and when a new game is introduced, the volume and subsequent will be unsupportable. Add this to the fact that video quality (which looked okay to me) is questionable at the framerates they’ve set forth, and things start looking a bit pie-in-the-sky. → Read More
Douglas did a fine job detailing what OnLive is yesterday and today we’re bringing you a hands-on demo of the cloud gaming service from the GDC show floor. The chap who gave us the demo does a find job of explaining how OnLive works in case you missed yesterday’s post. Sit tight and watch Devin suck at GRID.
We questioned one of the OnLive developers about possible bandwidth issues because of the nature of this service, but he says that ISPs like Comcast are fully aware and on-board with what OnLive is doing. It worked well in this isolated situation but we’ll have to wait and see what happens when it hits the market and thousands of folks are hitting their servers at once. But so far, so good. → Read More
A very interesting gaming service called OnLive was introduced at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco last night. OnLive consists of a small browser plug-in that lets you play games online, with all the heavy lifting done by OnLive’s servers – effectively meaning that if the service can live up to its promises, you’d have yourself a gaming platform that never gets obsolete and can be played on lower-end hardware. → Read More
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