Onlive - Streaming Videogame Content

[Jeigh1405241495 0]

TV streaming is no longer that amazing to us. It's a viable source of entertainment and works well in most cases. You can subscribe to services and purchase tv and movies to stream to your home computer or tv and everything is great. Why not do the same with video games?

At this years Game Dev Conference we see the announcement of OnLive. Personally this service is a crazy idea to me and has me very interested. Basically it will install a 1mb-ish plugin into a browser and then let you play full fledged games (Crysis, for example) on any computer with a fast enough net connection.

What basically will happen is your computer will task controller input, send it to the servers which are running the game, execute them, and feed the video response of the game back to you. All computation is done on servers and you just input controls and see the result. This will allow very weak systems to play games that are very computer intensive.

In theory this is pretty stellar. While there are technical concerns (will my net be fast enough, how much trasnfer will this use of my __GB cap, etc) in optimal situations this could be pretty awesome. Assuming it will use a subscription based system with individual prices for games/rentals, a lot of problems in the industry disappear. First and foremost piracy is just gone. How would someone steal games they never actually have? This could heavily reduce piracy and thus increase sales. Further there would be no need for physical production, cutting costs more and again increasing profits on every game sold. Even more, if the console makers got on board they could focus on making games and forget about hardware which usually loses them money anyways.

Ok, so sony and MS jumping on board is unlikely. But for now they have a good number of big name third party publishers ready to provide games for use on the service. Also, they intend to offer a cheap box you can buy to allow you to access the games via the net on your tv without having a computer connected to it. Analysts expect the box to be $50-100 so that'd be a great price range to allow access to a possibly never ending supply of content.

Possibly the biggest draw would be the removal of a need to upgrade hardware. When new games come out it would be OnLive who upgrades there servers, not the home user upgrading videocards. When patches come out, OnlIve would patch the games. There would be no more installs, no more boxes, nothing. Just games.

Ok, so this is all a grand idea that could fall flat. But personally it is very interesting to me. I'm looking forward to hearing more.

Opinions?

CNN Article about OnLive
OnLive Website