OnLive – Video Gaming Moving Forward Into The Cloud?

At the game developers conference this year, we learned about a revolutionarly video gaming service called OnLive which could provide games on demand. Created by Steve Perlman, mainly recognised as being the creator of Quicktime, comes a service backed my gaming giants such as Electronic Arts, THQ, Eidos, Ubisoft and Codemasters.

In essence, OnLive is an online game streaming service. The hardware itself is still in Beta testing and consists of a pretty small box unit and wireless controller.

They say that to play the highest quality games, users will require download speeds of around 5mbps or more, which is fairly reasonable as by the time the product is released, that will be a very modest connection indeed for any serious gamers.

In my opinion, this product is the perfect partner for anyone who is backing cloud computing as it near enough follows the same principles, however it does require a PC with video capabilities and at the moment, one running Windows or OS X.

Other sceptics have complained at the idea as it has oh so many restrictions. For example, having the games stored on servers and not your own personal PC, clearly destroys any hopes for the mod community of altering their beloved games. But at the end of the day, the developers probably couldn’t care less.

Another issue called into question is the need for uninterruptable broadband connections and whether or not the ISP’s can guarantee the required level of performance for this sort of use. At the moment, many households are restricted to download limits of sometimes around just 2Gb and I can’t believe for a second that this minimal connection will allow for this sort of intensive use.

There are uncountable sceptics about OnLive and whether it would actually work in practice, what with technical concerns over the internet connection and whether people would actually embrace this system. However many see it not as a realistic gaming solution, but rather a stepping stone to something that will ultimately be our future gaming platform, it will no doubt at least move developers in new directions as the world of computing strives towards the clouds.

However, with the recent news that OnLive have received more major investment, then this surely bodes well for its future development and ultimate release?

What do you think to this games on demand system? Will it ever work? Will the mainstream embrace it? Would you want to play you games in this way?

Related Pages:

1. OnLive Mobile Phone Demo Of Cloud Gaming
2. OnLive Release Date & Price Announced
3. OnLive Games on Demand! – Digital Game Distribution System
4. A Dead Computer, Backups and Living On a Cloud
5. Technology Of The Noughties: Cloud Computing

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