So, recently I saw an OnLive banner thing, and it interests me that people actually think this might work in out current state:
First off there is the pricing, it’s completely insane, $15 every month, this is without games, so no service whatsoever, is this worth $15? It doesn’t have an extended network like XBL and it doesn’t really seem they have much social stuff to do on there anyway (I have a theory about online gaming and this).
Now the next thing is, what about lag? The thing is, if you’re streaming live it’s never ever live, it’s always pseudo-live since it has at least a few seconds of lag from the place it is recorded to the place it is broadcasted (streamed) and then to you.
But lets assume, for a second, that they have eliminated this (with a secret algorithm that they don’t want to make even more profit from, whatever…) what about lag on your network? I often use wireless internet for my laptop to keep mobile (around the apartment and at school) and I honestly would not want to game on this connection, already connecting to games with great algorithms for reducing lag and latency it is hardly ever below 80ms, now let’s say they have a brilliant algorithm, a fucking incredible algorithm which wins a noble price next year, and they reduce this lag to 30-50ms…this lag will be on both the receiving and the sending side – so you send a mouse click, it takes 30-50ms to get to the servers, they send the resulting movement back, 60-100ms later, 60-100ms!?
This is quite some time to wait for something to happen, and this would be insanely annoying in a twitch shooter, you move [10 frames] it moves.
And even if they fixed all latency problems there would still be the argument that you would still be sitting on a network which potentially could break down at any time and theirs could too.
I like my local copies, I like my powerhouse machine (arguably it is 4 years old and no more a powerhouse than an EEE pc) and oh my I like Steam, hopefully Valve will do some work on making Steam independent soon, because that would hopefully make every other game company think twice about not having their games on Steam (if they aren’t already), I saw that UTE will be added to the Steamworks network soon, this is a big step towards more games being added.
Steam coming to the Mac is also a great big step for Valve/Steam, can’t wait to see what will happen, if companies will start making more Mac games? Well, there is always hope, more people/games on Steam is always welcome.
Did a google search for OnLive, 0.31 seconds to generate page (31ms lag).
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