OnLive gets a launch date - June 17th

[Ratty Sr.]

Make that 20 years for the states. Fiber-optic to the majority of households in the states is a long, expensive way off. Steam and it's offspring are the wave of the future for now

I'm pretty sure even third world countries will have omnipresent fiber-optic links 20 years from now.

...

Oh, I see what you did there.

 

[Ausdoerrt]

I'm pretty sure even third world countries will have omnipresent fiber-optic links 20 years from now.

That's quite idealistic. I'd be surprised if all 3rd-world countries had full access to clean water and sewage systems, let alone fiber-optics.

Agree with Garlic on the States. If anyone does have or will soon have the reasonable capability to make onLive work properly, it's Japan or S. Korea.

 

[Alphadrop]

The U.K is meant to have a plan for it and big cities do have fibre optics. However the telephone companies cripple the internet because they don't seem to understand it very well, or do understand it but like imposing bandwidth and speed limits for some inane reason.

 

[Ratty Sr.]

That's quite idealistic. I'd be surprised if all 3rd-world countries had full access to clean water and sewage systems, let alone fiber-optics.

Harumph. In Croatia we have fiber-optics in big cities. And clean water. And sewage. And the latter almost never seeps into the former.

But if you mean a place like Africa or Haiti, then I agree. However, I don't think Africa can at this point be used as any kind of standard to judge the world by - even the third world.

 

[Ausdoerrt]

Harumph. In Croatia we have fiber-optics in big cities. And clean water. And sewage. And the latter almost never seeps into the former.

Croatia never was a 3rd world country. It's a second-world country that'll start working towards being first-world once its EU accession is finalized. "3rd world" is basically the old term for "developing countries" that aren't part of either Western (1st world) or Soviet (2nd world) blocs that's still occasionally used today. While Yugoslavia was never part of the Warsaw pact, it was still commie thus I think most people would count it as "2nd world". That's if the "three worlds theory" wasn't hopelessly outdated anyway.

So yeah, I mean Africa, South America (one look at favelas in Brazil is enough to see how much those "urban" people would value high-speed Internet atm) etc. It's not just the completely failed states of Africa, even the developing countries that are moving in a good direction will take a while to "converge" (assuming that theory is actually correct).

As a side note, also Australia, cause while they might have good Internet, their latency to US servers is crazy, which I imagine would be a big issue for OnLive.

 

[Ratty Sr.]

Croatia never was a 3rd world country. It's a second-world country that'll start working towards being first-world once its EU accession is finalized. "3rd world" is basically the old term for "developing countries" that aren't part of either Western (1st world) or Soviet (2nd world) blocs that's still occasionally used today. While Yugoslavia was never part of the Warsaw pact, it was still commie thus I think most people would count it as "2nd world". That's if the "three worlds theory" wasn't hopelessly outdated anyway.

Actually, if you go by the traditional definition of the Third World as the group of non-aligned countries (i.e. those unaffiliated with either the US-led western block or USSR-dominated eastern block), then Yugoslavia is as third world as it gets, since it was one of the leaders and founding members of the non-aligned movement. But you are indeed correct that the three worlds theory no longer really applies, and Croatia is indeed slowly (very, very slowly) transforming itself into a first world country. But that is a discussion for another thread.

Back on topic, twenty years is a long time. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that twenty years from now urban centers of Brazil, India, and Mexico will have a broadband infrastructure as developed as their European or east-Asian counterparts - hell, it might be more developed, the way things have been going lately. As for the so-called First World, I wouldn't be surprised if twenty years from now every citizen has access to universal, state-subsidized wireless broadband, with speeds in excess of 10 Gbps. With that kind of bandwidth, not only gaming, but the entirety of digital entertainment and computation in general could potentially move to the cloud. Forget desktop applications running on an operating system - the browser will be the operating system, and every app will be a web service, running on some remote server farm.

 

[Shadow of the Wastes]

To all the people who are just now realizing this is a lol idea, welcome to forever ago.


As penny arcade so aptly put it

 

[Hassknecht]

Streaming games, what a load of crap. I want to buy my game once and then have it on a physical medium to install it on my physical hard drive whenever the fuck I want.
Yes, I'm probably as backwards as DB's arms, but I just like having my own fully usable computer. I also like owning what I buy and not being dependend on the state of my internet connection.

 

[Shadow of the Wastes]

Streaming games, what a load of crap. I want to buy my game once and then have it on a physical medium to install it on my physical hard drive whenever the fuck I want.
Yes, I'm probably as backwards as DB's arms, but I just like having my own fully usable computer. I also like owning what I buy and not being dependend on the state of my internet connection.

but but but digital distribution is the future! fat nerds told me so...

 

[Ratty Sr.]

Streaming games, what a load of crap. I want to buy my game once and then have it on a physical medium to install it on my physical hard drive whenever the fuck I want.
Yes, I'm probably as backwards as DB's arms, but I just like having my own fully usable computer. I also like owning what I buy and not being dependend on the state of my internet connection.

Read an EULA every once in a while. You've never owned any piece of software you ever bought, and you never will. The chief difference between locally installed games and streaming games is purely technical - the former execute client-side, while the latter execute server-side. The former model has some advantages, such as permitting some degree of game modification (since the user has access to game data and binaries), but I'd say disadvantages are beginning to outweigh the advantages, and they are becoming more and more glaring.

The principal issue is scalability. For the developer, it is not economical to develop games for a multitude of different hardware and software platforms, which can differ wildly in fundamental architecture, but even moreso in processing power. For the consumer, it is not economical to own the whole spectrum of gaming platforms (how many people do you know who own every game console and a gaming-capable PC?), or (in the particular case of the PC) constantly purchase new hardware to keep up with growing demand for processing power and memory capacity. Server-side, streamed games offer an elegant solution to the issue of scalability, since they scale to any device capable of connecting to the Internet, rendering video and accepting input... which nowadays is pretty much every device, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer.

Moreover, server-side games are a good thing for the publisher/developer, since they have constant and direct control over the entirety of the game data and code, including compiled code. This makes games effectively unhackable and unpiratable. For many users this will be a shortcoming, as I mentioned before, but I think it's safe to say the majority won't care. Hell, they might consider it a good thing - no access to game binaries means no need to go through the hassle of installation or patching.

One aspect that could potentially be both positive and negative for consumers is the transition to a subscription-based pricing model. We are so accustomed to paying once for a game and then playing it without limitations that the idea of paying a monthly subscription for games seems like an affront. But on the other hand, it is easy to overlook potential gains of the game-as-service approach. Imagine being able to play your game on any device, anywhere. The current, client-side model just doesn't accommodate that well, if at all. Moreover, while I agree it's absurd to expect users to pay $15 or more a month to play a game, there are many ways to make the general idea of a subscription model palatable - e.g. by providing access to a whole game library for a fixed monthly sum (like Netflix does for movies), by having one base fee for the entire service (like Xbox Live), plus a small monthly fee on top of that for each game, etc.

Finally, the complaint about being dependent on the state of your Internet connection is shortsighted. What if your Internet connection was as fast and reliable as your system bus? In a not-too-distant future, it will be, and there will ultimately be no difference between running an application on the client or using it as a web service.

but but but digital distribution is the future! fat nerds told me so...

Oh, boy. You might want to put away that edge before you cut yourself.

 

[Arden]

EULA and legally owning things is just one part of the whole package. Legally now you do not own a game but have the license to use it, and you have it legally in your possession. With streaming serverside stuffthings that changes to having legally a license to play it but you do no longer have the game in your possession. Its on some server on the other side of the globe.

If that server goes belly-up or gets shut down due to financial or legal trouble of the firm that owns the servers your fucked. You still have the license to play it but since you don’t have the game in your possession you cant play it. Of course you can sue the service for preventing you from playing. Good luck with trying to get your 70 bucks worth of gamepossession back from a firm in legal/financial trouble in some other country after signing/agreeing to some OnLive EULA.

OnLive sonds to me like: first give me cash so you "own" a game that’s on our serverfarm in cheap farawaytown in backwardistan (cost-efficient investment placing). Then pay us a service fee so you can play this game over internet (connection problems were already discussed). If the hamster powering the servers in farawaytown dies of starvation (cutting cost and streamlining the company) you cant play your game but probably still get billed for the streamingservice, because they are two different contracts.

That is what bothers me with a serverside solution: if someone else somewhere else fucks up, I pay the price. If steam or GFWL or OnLive crash and burn, I don’t give a shit because my stuff is on my discs or drives in my home and I can play them whenever I want. Some will prefer to turn over that independence in favour of less hardware requirements at home. I will not.

 

[Ilosar]

It's not like EULA's are actual legislative pieces anyway. No decent court would accept it, it's way too one-sided.

On topic, yeah, it seems like one of those ''this is the new shit!' concepts whose flaws should have been obvious immediately after it was presented. Very few people will have internet access fast enough not to lag like crazy before about 10 years (btw fibre optics will take a long time to be implemented in developped countries, let alone third-world ones), it's very pricey tech), you can't play if Internet access is cut-off (remember how much of an hassle that was for games like Assassin's Creed 2?), and I am certainly not paying a subscription to play a game I own, that's what MMO's are for.

 

[Hassknecht]

My problem with this "everything is on the server" is that there is too much control over what I can do.
Steam showed us how that can go wrong: They put on a demo for Aliens vs. Predator, but then Sega decided they will not publish it in Germany. So the next day, it was gone from german computers.
Amazon is similar. The guys holding the rights to George Orwells novels suddenly decided that '1984' et al. should not be on Kindle, so the next day it was gone from Kindles all over the world.
Yes, you get your money back, but I still don't like that they can just take their stuff back and you can't do shit about it.
They have the ability and they will use it. I don't like it.
Region control is another thing. For example, I can't think of a way to play the english version of Fallout New Vegas in any legal way (besides a proxy setup) because it's Steam-bound and it tracks the IP-address.
And when the service goes down? You can't play the game anymore. That's just bad. And don't say "Yeah well they have to watch out for it".
They won't. It happened before, and it will happen again. The servers will go down time and time again.

Another thing is modding, you said it. Modding is a huge part of the gaming experience and it will die out if every game is a stream game.

I don't mind the service in general or the idea. I mind the notion that in a few years, every game will be streamed to me from a serverfarm far, far away.

 

[Wintermind]

Streaming as an available service would be cool. I just got into Google Music and it's the shit. You can upload up to 20,000 songs to google's servers and listen to them anywhere you have the internet. It's free, and kicks ass. You also get access to a small amount of public domain songs/recordings and/or groups giving stuff out. Roughly around a hundred songs, but still, free music. As far as I know you can't use it for Cloud Storage, but it's still pretty cool.