It has been one of the most anticipated gaming services for some time now. Last Thursday, I got my ID and password for OnLive and I have put in close to 20 hours playing on this service. In many ways it reminds me of my first cable like experience OnTV. There is really nothing like it at the moment. It is in its infancy and will likely improve greatly from here. Read about my first impression and the expectation what we likely have to look forward to as this technology matures.
OnLive Gaming System
In thinking back, I wonder if the OnTV service was more of a precursor to Netflix and cable TV, because you generally watched a VCR tape of a movie and rarely watched it live. However, against the alternative which was buying moves for $75+ each, OnTV’s monthly cost of about $19 in combination with a VCR was a real deal. You’d set the VCR in 8 hour mode and get 3 to 4 movies per tape and then you could watch them whenever you wanted.
Looking back, that was dark ages stuff. No TiVos or video on demand, and clearly no HD. It would have been an overstatement to describe the content you ended up with as standard definition.
OnLive
Fast forward 20 years to today and things and expectations are very different. OnLive streams an HD image of the game you are playing. Games include Batman: Arkham Asylum, Assassin’s Creed II, Borderlands, Dirt 2, F.E.A.R. 2, Harry Potter 1-4, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Unreal Tournament III: Titan Pack, and Just Cause 2. I tried a couple of the games: They have more than 20 at launch, but I got hooked on the Real Time Strategy game called Defense Grid Gold.
I didn’t notice any difference between playing this game through the service than I would have expected had I played it locally. There was no lag or buffering. I did not compare this side to side with a game playing locally as I wanted to see if the experience was adequate since I know they do some tuning in order to provide a low latency HD video stream. You can see a nice side-by-side detailed review here.
To sum up, 3D games look better than 2D games, but I played a 2D game for about an hour (World of Goo) and it was very playable. All gaming was done on my 3 screen AMD Eyefinity configuration (3 24” monitors in portrait mode) and the result looked great.
Game load times are in seconds and the time it took me to install the client and start running was about 2 minutes. If I needed to, I’ll bet I could have done it faster. One of the interesting things with an OnLive game is that since it is playing in a browser, it plays well with everything else. You can also leave the game alone and go to another machine, log back in, and start back up where you left off. This is particularly handy with RTS titles or campaigns, because as long as you can get to another connected machine you can play from where you left off with all of the content you unlocked instantly available to you.
Since the game is actually running on OnLive’s hardware and not your own, you can multi-task to your heart’s content. Have an RTS running in the corner of your screen while you are doing email or keeping up with your twitter buddies. Most games I play take up most of the systems resources so that multi-tasking can be painful. Finally, buying a game is instantaneous. It was very similar to buying a movie to watch on the web. You don’t get the physical game but once you bought it you can play it as many times as you want from any computer.
The only issues are that you need a reasonably fast Internet access for this to work. Before you can log into the service, it will make sure you have enough performance. My guess is, though I’ll find out later this week, that this won’t work in most hotel rooms due to network loading. It also currently won’t work over Wi-Fi as Wi-Fi causes too much performance degradation. Don’t even think about running it on Wi-Fi on a plane.
Overall, I found I could live in this service now let’s look ahead at what this could mean going forward.
Looking Ahead and the Death of Consoles
While I played the games on a PC, OnLive has also a thin client console that will work as well. It isn’t yet clear whether this console will be free with the service but even if it isn’t, the cost should be under $75. This price point easily fits within a cell phone pricing/service model and provides the potential for a cable provider to build the core console technology into a set top box or a TV manufacturer to put it into a TV. If that happens, why would you need a console? And if you think this is farfetched, Smart TVs are already starting to show up with browser access to a variety of services. Why not games? They just have to run a standard browser and many of these products are going in that direction anyway.
One of the aspects of this service I enjoyed a great deal was Arena. This is where you go to watch other’s paly and it was fascinating two watch other folks play interesting games. It was also a better way than a typical demo to get familiar with a game and figure out if I wanted to play it.
But if I can run games in a browser why not my entire desktop? I think this is the very beginning of moving our computing experience onto the web and into the Cloud. The cost and potential security advantages of something like this done right are very compelling. Never having to upgrade hardware (that is handled by the service) backups done automatically in the service and the ability to start something at work, go home, and see your desktop must as you left it while you continue to work are only the tip of this iceberg. Because, if you think about it, iPads run complete browsers and so do cell phones.
While it may be 5G (we are 3G now) that may be required to give this level of performance it isn’t hard to imagine a time when all we’d need is our cell phone and a desktop dock to get our full PC experience wherever we are.
OnLive is great, but the best is yet to come
I really think we are looking at the end of computing the way we have known it. It won’t happen overnight. In fact I’ll bet we are on a 10 to 15 year cycle to move from desktop computing to web computing. But I think that 15 years from now, our kids will look back at the way we used to work and play on the web much like our parents looked back on the way folks used horses at the beginning of the last century as incredibly archaic.
However, the part I became most interested in was Arena as I could bring it up and put it in the corner of my screen and then go to it if there was something that looked interesting. Kind of like reality TV except with games. As games advance I’ll bet more of us will spend time watching others play rather than just playing ourselves. In addition it looks really cool on a big screen TV.
In the end I’m actually rather impressed with OnLive and found it vastly better in its initial form then I actually had expected. But the best is clearly yet to come and I wonder how long it will be before we see something like this in on our Cable box or even on our iPad.
