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Technology company OnLive has unveiled what it believes could revolutionise the PC gaming industry, allowing anyone with even the most modest of PCs or Laptops to play the most demanding of PC games such as Crysis.
The new service makes use of cloud computing. The actual task of processing the game and its components is handled on remote servers, with the user’s local computer simply used to send control inputs and receive a video and audio stream which can then be output to a display. The service will work with any PC game and does not require developers to modify their games in any way.
In order to use the service gamers will be required to download a small application (one megabyte) to their PC. Alternatively, OnLive will offer a device it’s calling the Micro-Console, a low-cost, small footprint hub which can output audio and video to a TV and take controller inputs from the user. Users of OnLive’s service will be charged a relatively low monthly subscription free, which could be combined with a per-game business model although specifics are still being worked out.
The level of service will also be dependent on the speed of broadband available to the user, with a speed of at least 1.5 megabits per second required for SD, while a 720p HD experience will require broadband of at least 5mbps.
The service also appears to have the support of a number of big publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Take-Two, Eidos, and Atari.
There’s also the obvious concern over latency causing an unresponsive gaming experience, with button and key presses not translating to instant on-screen actions. OnLive has this under control.
“Not only have we solved the problem of compressing the video games, we’ve solved the latency problem,” OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman told Gamasutra. “We knew, in order to make this thing work, we’d have to figure out a way to get video to run compressed over consumer connections with effectively no latency. Our video compression technology has one millisecond in latency – basically no latency at all. All the latency is just for the transport, and we’ve also addressed that.”
OnLive plans to launch this winter and is targeting the huge PC user base that Steam simply can’t sell to.
“We’re going to hit 200 million people that Steam can’t sell to, who have non-GPU-based PCs but want to play the latest games,” said COO Mike McGarvey. “Yes, they are a competitor, but we’re a little more of a pure platform than just digital distribution. And we eliminate the need to purchase hardware. None of those [other services] expand the market like we do.”
Is OnLive the future of PC gaming? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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