Moving Video Games to the Clouds. OnLive, a Palo Alto, CA-based startup wants to do away with gaming consoles, game resellers, and the need to buy any more expensive graphics chips. Today the company announced a service that lets any computer run the sorts of graphics-intensive video games traditionally reserved for high-end gaming systems. Games can also be played on a TV using a small device offered by the company that connects a television to a broadband Internet connection. The idea is to separate games from consoles or desktop computers, says Steve Perlman, founder and CEO of OnLive, a spinout of a Silicon Valley-based incubator called Rearden. The intense computation needed to render each game happens remotely, in a specialized server farm with thousands of computers crunching numbers. Perlman, who helped develop the QuickTime video compression format while at Apple, says, “You don’t need a high-end PC to run these games.
The idea of playing video games via the Internet is nothing new, of course. Welcome to OnLive.com. Video Game Streaming Is Here: The End of the Console? A new company and service called OnLive is hoping to shake up the video game industry with a new cloud gaming service on demand.
Think of it like your Netflix Instant Queue for games, where instead of buying physical media or even spending time downloading large files you can just log in and begin playing any video game across the internet. That's the experience OnLive hopes to deliver, and today marks the opening of the beta program for those who signed up after the company initially went public to the press back at the Game Developer's Conference in March of this year. Much like what Netflix or Hulu are now doing with online video, OnLive hopes to do with gaming. You'll be able to access the service on PCs and Macs with compatible hardware requirements via a browser plug-in and hop right into multiplayer matches against other players on various platforms (you'll need a broadband internet connection to use the service).
Give Cloud Gaming A Chance? [In this opinion piece, Gamasutra's Kris Graft looks at some of the furore around cloud gaming service OnLive in the context of core gamers and the wider industry, suggesting that cloud services may do more for gaming than many expect.]
The excitement for cloud-based gaming seems to have tempered considerably since OnLive's introduction at GDC 2009, as following its June launch, the realities of the current service are now apparent. It's understandable why some of the buzz has died down among gamers. Lag on the service is kept at minimum but still nevertheless noticeable, particularly when playing with a mouse and keyboard; you don't actually 'own' a physical or even digital copy of the game on your own hard drive. In addition, you are presented with lower resolutions than if you had a higher-end PC with a locally-installed game; and the technology requires you to be constantly connected to the internet. First, many of the concerns about OnLive are concerns of the core PC gamer.