Back in March this year a Californian company called OnLive set out its stall to achieve superfast gaming on low powered machines, by putting the processing for games into the cloud and sending playout video back to the device. It signed up EA, Ubisoft, Take Two Interactive, WEB Games, Eidos, THQ and Atari to license games to it.
The OnLive idea is incredibly simple. The world has spent almost 20 years working out how to create online gaming, but almost everyone has tried to work out how to send co-ordinates and the various map positions of players in a 3D gaming scene, with 6 degrees of freedom. All of them require huge multi-megabyte virtual world downloads, rapid networking and super fast graphic rendering (GPU chips).
But since networks can already stream video, the OnLive system just does that ‘ it streams accurate real time video to each device, very, very, very fast and sends your controller actions upstream. The game play itself can just draw power from a bank of specially designed central servers which have all the latency taken out of them that modern design can manage. The result is that a netbook, a mobile phone and any PC, plus a very cheap home console, all have the power to play powerful video games remotely ‘ no downloads, no game purchase ‘ and a variety of business models, from renting one session at a time to monthly subscriptions ‘ are due to come out shortly.
Now you might think ‘ that won’t work, or can’t work, and we sympathize (we just want it to work maybe) and then six weeks ago, OnLive signed up some new investors which included AT&T Media Holdings, Lauder Partners, Warner Brothers, Autodesk, and Maverick Capital. Although the amount of money was not given, it is thought to be enough to pay for a big media launch of the service before Christmas this year. These guys do not give millions of dollars away to support a system that doesn’t work. The network is currently in beta and only in the US.
OnLive now has added new publishers including 2D Boy, Codemasters, Epic Games, 2K Games to the earlier list, and in fact its only weakness is not having games controlled by the major consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360 because they naturally don’t want to undermine their own platforms.
The man behind all of this is one of the key designers of the Apple Mac and Quicktime – Steve Perlman, an entrepreneur who has stood the test of time, moving from his early Mac work to file 80 of his own patents, and he has worked at gaming companies like General Magic, helped put gaming companies like Sega and Nintendo online with multi-player games, and built and sold WebTV Networks to Microsoft. He’s like a poor man’s Steve Jobs ‘ yes he has the power to imagine, but no he’s not a billionaire ‘ yet.
Another thing, if you think for a second about this, is that if the rendering and game play is done centrally and the video representation dispatched instantaneously, then it can go to as many places as you like. Yes that’s right, gaming with thousands, if not millions of spectators. Fan bases for players, international ‘ no, global ‘ competitions, which create the ultimate reality entertainment, you as Lara Croft shooting everything in sight, or as Riddick, beating up lots and lots of Aliens ‘ as gaming moves from the active only to being both active and passive entertainment.
We might assume that AT&T has invested in this so that it can bring these games, over its existing network to a iPhone, and then you can see how potentially disruptive this could be.
The OnLive web site promises – massive spectating, instant community on an epic scale, something called Brag clips, where you can record and show your friend that legendary game you claimed you played at 3.00 am in the morning; try new games before you buy them, watch top players demonstrate games and get your hands on any game instantly. Sometime before Christmas (in the US only we suspect to start with) all of this will become possible (any day we suspect) without any downloads, the need for a monster PC, and with no complex installation process. Oh and did we say, cheap to try out. And if it works, the PS3 and Xbox 360 could be in the bin with the wrapping paper come the day after Christmas.