We've now pretty much reached
saturation point with
OnLive demos, so it's good to finally see an independent set of eyes poring over the service and giving us the lowdown on the actual user experience. Whether you call it on demand, streamed, or cloud gaming, the concept is remarkably simple -- OnLive pumps games via a web browser onto your machine and gives you the full gaming experience without the need for all that
pretty, but expensive hardware.
PC Perspective's Ryan Shrout "found" a login to the Beta program and has put together a very thorough comparison between OnLive and playing the games locally on the same computer. His conclusion is that latency issues at present make an FPS like
Unreal Tournament unplayable, but slower input games like
Burnout Paradise or
Mass Effect give pleasingly close renditions of the real thing. We encourage you to hit the source link to see side-by-side video comparisons and more in-depth analysis.
Update: We had a feeling this one would be kinda controversial and sure enough OnLive and
Pc Per have gotten into a bit of a sparring match. Steve Perlman has noted the paramount importance of latency in a
blog post, subtly hinting that Ryan was too far out to have a valid experience, while Ryan
has responded that he'd be happy to test it on servers local to him if OnLive were up for it, and again reiterated his purpose was to stimulate discussion more than it was to give a definitive judgment on what is still a Beta service.
posted January 21st 2010 6:47AM
I knew it was too good to be true.
@Mitchell R
So did I. Unless it runs on the Japan's network which offers insane speed like 100mpbs, I seriously doubt it would be successful
As this guy was outside of the supported area; I really don't see how this can be proof of how well the system works, or doesn't as the case may be.
Great write up and over view on the service though and I love the comparison videos :)
@Tripmonkey .. exactly ! .. The OnLive people have made it very, very clear that the service will not work for everyone and is highly dependent on where you live and what your connection is.
@Tripmonkey
I'm dubious about this review... I didn't read the whole thing, but sentences like this make me think that the guy has no idea what this service is:
"If your game doesn't work because of some random DRM issue you are without any kind of ability to fix it yourself - be prepared to get on the phone with the guys at OnLive."
DRM? This is a freaking VIDEO STREAMING service... OnLive partnered with a bunch of gaming companies, so all of the games are probably loaded onto super-fast permanent media. It's not like some computer up in the cloud has a physical copy of a disk from Walmart that needs an activation code.
@Mitchell R
It doesn't sound like speed / latency is the real issue. To me, it's the inferior PQ that I find disappointing. I don't think living closer to a sever will net you better graphic details. Maybe their compression algorithm is stripping extra detail and extra colors from the stream? That's more important to me based on the type of games that I play on my PS3.
@Mitchell R
This guy doesn't seem to know what he was doing with the beta. If he knew anything he could've ran a third-party program to find out where the packets were going and run a traceroute. I'm surprised he bitched so much about latency but, didn't tell where the servers were located or the what route the packets were going.
For all we know it could've been him ending up on the wrong backbone.
@Mitchell R
You should also checkout StreamMyGame. Still a bit beta like but they have a free version of Onlive that works over your home network. Works on my netbook. Has an option to be used over broadband too but havnt tried it.
One of my friends got into the beta (and I was the one who told him about it, the bastard) and is fairly impressed with Crysis Warhead. You get 80% of the image quality without the need for any special hardware. Is it as good as playing it locally on a good computer? No. But there are obvious advantages (like being able to play Crysis Warhead on your mother-in-law's 5-year-old Macbook).
Where do I sign up ?
Yeahh... had my hopes up for this. Hopefully they can make it better.
@wesley anthony I still wanna try it of course, and see the capabilties of watching games played on mobile devices and such!
So tell me if I have got this straight. The service blocks him initially for having bad ping times. But it finally lets him in when it recovers a bit at which case he proceeds to bitch about latency within the games.
I mean come on. OnLive is designed for those who have decent internet connections. Everyone should know that already.
@taligent Just what I was thinking. Besides, even if there still are latency issues when it goes fully live, it's still a very nice, very enticing platform to play slower paced games, and the advantage should not be underwritten. They might have overshot their expectations, but it still works, and damn fine for what everybody really expected (or what current technology can provide). Sure, it'd be nice if we lived in a world of low latencies and gigabit connections to every server, but for what we have right now, and for the price, there's simply no competition.
@taligent Exactly, OnLive's "breakthrough" tech was in low-latency video encoding, but there's essentially nothing they can do about the network infrastructure that serves it to you. It is a great idea and perhaps even the future but, in most countries at least, it's certainly before its time.
@taligent: Totally agree with you. OnLive was warning the guy he was too far away (it turns out he was more than 1000 miles too far away), but he chose to proceed anyway. And, then his only complaint about playability was the lag. Depending on how their video compression works, the distance could have impacted the video quality, too.
@taligent
//I mean come on. OnLive is designed for those who have decent internet connections. Everyone should know that already.//
I did some ferreting around and I found that his internet connection has 33.42Mb/s down 1.40Mb/s Up, a decent internet connection if I do say so myself.
Anyway I didn't think that OnLive had this many fanboys at this point, maybe they might be able to survive afterall.
@mikemil828 The point is not the speed (he had enough of it), but the latency. While I can't comment on the impact of latency on image quality, his primary complaint through all this WAS latency.
Essentially, OnLive is a very geography-centric service; you need to be within a certain distance from the nearest datacenter. He, someone well outside the geographical beta area, fraudulently gained access to the beta. Of COURSE he'd experience high latency! He even got constant warnings that his latency was too high.
If he had actually traveled to the location that this "friend of a friend" lived, his review might have been useful....
@taligent Actually you didn't get it straight. Was not blocked initially, was blocked once in several weeks of testing while the internet connections was god awful.
@Guspaz
//The point is not the speed (he had enough of it), but the latency.//
Actually that was taligent's point, he claimed that the reviewer had a poor connection, and I corrected him on that, he had a good connection, but as you guys are ever so quick to point out, he wasn't reviewing in a good location.
I think it seems an effort in futility. A demo'd service, add a few hundred thousand users and watch it buckle. Plus who plays games at 1280 x 720 these days. If you can afford the high speed internet connection required then I'm pretty sure you can half your speed save some penny's and update your system accordingly. Its a nice idea for mobile devices, but I feel the price over cost of current hardware makes this vapourware already. I recon they will make more money from the compressional algorythms used to directly stream to users.
@Jaster - yeah. And when they go belly-up, have fun with all those OnLive hosted games you paid for earlier...*poof*
@NewL I guess this makes sense. I'd like to see Online further expand by selling you a physical copy (shipped in a simple box with paper dvd sleeves) of your game for, say, an extra 10 bucks, that way, "when they go bell-up", you still keep your game, after all, when you buy games nowadays, you mostly pay for the content as the media itself costs only a few cents.
@NewL haha...yeah never thought of that ... they would have to offer you a full copy of the game and respectable hardware to play it on....quick quick...sign up...the legal ramifications may result in us all recieving brand new systems LOL...
@Jaster Video cards are on a downward trend in pricing for above-average hardware... that's really what is going to kill on-live. Well... that and the enormous unsolvable lag.
TACHYONS
This thing will never work, and it's a terrible path for the gaming industry to go down, so I hope it fails. Imaging having to pay a monthly fee just to play singleplayer games. Oh, and you don't even the disc. So forget like playing the game on a car ride or something, won't even be possible. And there's still no hinting at the pricing of the games itself. From what I've heard it won't even be discounted from the value you find in buying the physical format.
And not only do you buy the game, but you NEED to pay the monthly subscription ontop of it, just to play it. So no optional services like Xbox Live where you can choose to pay or not. You have to pay, even to play a singleplayer only game. And forget mods! YOU DON'T EVEN OWN THE GAME!
@Solidstate89 You make a good point about mods.
@John Day who needs discs anyway...
I like the steam model, that's working for me.
Actually... the latency he's reporting sounds amazing. The guy says he is using a stolen Beta account from Southern California, and he's using OnLive from the Cincinnati area (check out his forum, he has a Speedtest there identifying his location). So, OnLive is connecting the guy from Cincinnati to a Beta server in California.
OnLive's FAQ says it can only work up to 1000 miles from its data center. Cincinnati to California is over 2000 miles. If he can play any game at that distance, that's stone dead amazing. And it's no surprise a FPS is too laggy at 2000 miles. You can't play multiplayer FPS at such a long ping either. If he can play an FPS at all at 2000 miles, it probably works great at shorter distances.
I mean, check it out...this guy is playing Burnout and Hawx over a 2000 mile connection and says it's almost like playing it locally. And, the mouse is even usable at that distance?
The possibilities are mindblowing.
@Preza You're pumped the mouse is usable?
I know people who VNC into their computers from around the world! For free! And the mouse is usable!
@Preza
//You can't play multiplayer FPS at such a long ping either. If he can play an FPS at all at 2000 miles, it probably works great at shorter distances.//
Unlikely, the reviewer just updated his review to note that he was getting 80ms ping to the onlive servers, it's doubtful that he would have gotten all that much better results than what he got, even if he was closer.
This is awful blogging. The title of this post would lead you to believe that OnLive was a bad service when in fact this is such a haphazard demo where the demoer digresses that he does not have a decent connection to the service. Why tarnish OnLive's reputation so carelessly on the premise of such a half-ass demo!?
@Ahmed Refaat because:
1.Ryan Shrout is someone who speaks of what he doesn't know as if he does, and for that he gets rewarded with numbskull following who need no disclaimers because it aint the truth they following.
2. Because Engadget suddenly uses PCperspective (a dreadful site) as example to illustrate many of its stories (i dunno why, but i suspect its money related).
@doutorpiranha
You're now my fave poster on here ever :)
@Ahmed Refaat: Welcome, OnLive employee.
Engadget does this crap all the time. They've done it to products I worked on too many times, and all I can say is try not to get too worked up, because there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to grin and bear it.
OMG! maybe this is what we need to get people to focus on latency (gaming) rather than 2342345235 mbps downloads (torrents..).
And that's that. I can't imagine the load a ton of users would place on the system. I expect it to be quite bad.
Something sure does smell fishy what with the slew of first commenters on this particular entry...
burnout paradise needs slower input? how does he make those sharp corners? this interesting idea isnot going to work because it requires ridiculously expensive internet bandwidth to reduce latency.
@htd
bandwidth (you really mean throughput) has NOTHING to do with latency... I'm getting really tired of the ignorant 15 year-olds on Engadget. A geek without knowledge or general intelligence is just sad..
Posting this is really a poor choice on Engadget's part.
Not only was this guy apparently using an unofficial beta account, but he was twice the maximum recommended distance from the servers. Then Engadget makes the title and summary sound like OnLive doesn't work, yet it apparently *is* usable over those distances!
This kind of sloppy reporting has the possibility to cause people who might have been interested in OnLive to dismiss it when it finally goes live.
I, for one, am grateful that the "article" and summary are flat out wrong. I've been looking to seeing OnLive work - from a technical perspective if nothing else - since first hearing about it. In fact, I think it is encouraging that it worked even remotely well over that distance.
(Note: I have no connection to any parties involved in this discussion.)
@OverZealous While I AM grateful for the sneak peek, the OnLive folks are gonna have a cow. Someone obviously violated their NDA by allowing this guy to test drive (I'm a bit jealous). If you're really interested in this technology and early review, PDF the article (as I did) as I'm sure OnLive's lawyers have already contacted this guy to yank it. (As for Fan Boy numbers, here's what I found at OnLivefans.com:
Threads: 875, Posts: 6,974, Members: 8,228, Active Members: 654
Not huge, but more than a handful.)
Those people who use this service are hardly going to be hardcore gamers; they are not the target cosumer. Regardless of how good the service is, there are always going to be people who prefer to pimp up their PC and use wired mice to reduce lag like F1 companies who try to shed milliseconds.
I'd like to see a review from somebody with a decent latency.
I'll ignore the parts of this review that bitch about responsiveness.
Otherwise, it looks great.
wow lame engadget lame.. he is 1k away IT EVEN WARMS HIM HE IS and you take this as fact? Wow /epic fail
All you naysayers are morons.
If you watched the PREVIOUS onlive demo given at columbia university, the guy clearly explained that people need to be within a certain range of one of their data centers. They even broke down the math for you and told you about what ping time you need to get a perceived real-time rendering effect. I really think that this guy who wrote the original article should take it down. It's not fair to have people judge OnLive the way it is now from someone who isn't even authorized to use the service, and who is probably too far away from a datacenter to get a decent experience.
How about he gives the login to someone who has a Verizon FIOS connection (at least 10mbit both ways) that lives about 30-60 miles away from one of OnLive's datacenters, and THEN let's see how the experience goes!
@(Unverified)
yeah, because a FiOS connection from someone that lives 10 miles from the server center is sooooo much more representative of the average user than a random guy who lives in cincinnati
This is the future of gaming.
Sure there are still things that need to get fixed and it might not be optimal for all games in all situations in all locations, but streaming game video onto any device that can support it is going to decouple the gaming hardware from the gamer.
I honestly think that OnLive will end up getting bought out by someone like Sony or Microsoft and have this service get integrated into some future settop box that costs $50 to make (versus $500), while the actual next-gen gaming hardware is in some server-farm in the middle of nowhere.
Quakelive is a good implementation of a FPS. It is very playable. gets boring after a while, but in concept, it is fantastic. runs great on my laptop with integrated intel graphics.
How useless. The guy is just fishing for clicks. His setup couldn't be worse for OnLive.
will need some nuclear comcastic access speeds for this to fly right~