It’s like OnLive makes people angry. Of course it’s kinda revolutionary. Let’s look at arguments. Like this one:
“Let’s say tens of thousands of people sign up for the launch of Run, Shoot, Kill, Repeat 10. That’s the sole reason they’ve signed up for the service, and it’s their first impression. They, like a ton of other people, want to play the game the first second it’s available. Good luck managing that demand spike without having crap performance and pissing everyone off.”
You guys remember the launch of Steam? Ask Valve people how many players were puking on the service when it launched. It was in 2003 after being revealed at the GDC 02 and digital distribution was exactly at the same point that cloud computing is today: something nobody is arguing against that it is the future and yet nobody is doing it.
Now Steam has 20M+ user accounts and they’re the big fucking beast, the leader of the games digital distribution that everyone is trying to compete. I think OnLive is ready to take the risk to piss off users on day one. No problem.
Second argument I read a lot:
“The problem is in the nature of the task. Games are inherently compute intensive. There’s a reason that you need a behemoth of a machine to run Crysis.
For a service of this kind to make any money, you need to be able to support tens of thousands of users at the same time. Halo 3, for example, has 80k users online as I write this. Granted, this is across the entire world, but the hardware to support the simulation, rendering and video compression for each of those games would be staggering.”
Who said it would only be Crysis and über heavy demanding games that people are going to play? What about a game like GRID running on a little 8.9” netbook screen? It sure demands a lot less power than on a 24”. Who said people are going to play games which need extreme reactivity? World of Goo can be played with a big latency I guess. If I look at my software synthesizers, “real time latency” –below 5ms- is not needed for a lot of things (even if for some like drums it’s mandatory). SF IV is running smoothly online and frankly I’m impressed. A few years ago it was still a dream plagged with issues.
I think people are a bit jealous :) Of course publishers have already signed up otherwise they’re really going to die: developers could push their game on the service without worrying about publishers, exclusivity shit deals. Noby Noby Boy and Flower would totally benefit from a service like this (remember the spectator value). Instead of that, they’re stuck on a platform and nobody cares about them despite the fact that they’re really cool games. Go OnLive, go. And make room for game developers, they’re going to make you successful.
I’ll do a third post on GDC about ease of development and social responsability.
Last week was my first time with Madworld on Wii. Disturbing, assumed and viciously joyful.
COME HEEERE