The Daily Grind: Will streaming technology revolutionize MMO gameplay?
Along with much of the gaming world, we were excited to hear the GDC 09 news about OnLive and Gaikai. The services both companies will offer (likely to enter beta testing in the next year) will eliminate the graphics performance of your computer as a barrier to play. The concept is that the company's servers do all the graphics crunching and stream the output to your computer, so all you would need is a decent broadband connection.
In the case of Gaikai and its Streaming Worlds technology, they've specifically mentioned MMO play through their service for World of Warcraft and EVE Online. You don't need to download clients or patches to your own machine, that'll be done remotely on the Gaikai servers. They'll stream games right to your web browser via Flash. If this all pans out as they say it will, it'll be feasible to run MMOs on older machines as well as on laptops that are normally considered below spec to run these titles.
While there are some big "IFs" with how this will work out, particularly as it concerns latency, do you feel the accessibility these services can offer could revolutionize MMO gaming?
