We talked to you a while ago about a new gaming revolution called OnLive, and the company’s founder Steve Perlman, has been appearing at shows, the DICE Summit in February and the Game Developers Conference in March, both in the US, showing the system off.
To remind you, it is based on an extremely thin client which can run on a phone, a netbook, any kind of PC and even a cheap $100 Micro-console next to your TV set, and it works on the ability to stream video and control commands at superfast speeds to and from a remote server.
The game logic resides on central servers, all of which are currently based in the US, and all of them need to be within 1,000 miles of you in order to play games with sub 20 millisecond response time. The game imagery is sent to you over a 1.5 Mbps broadband connection and it can even offer HD gaming at 5 Mbps. The control buttons you press are sent instantaneously all the way back to the game on the remote server. Perlman has spent that last five years getting all the inherent delays and latency out of traditional servers, storage and network interfaces, in order to get this to work.
Perlman now has a launch date of June 17, which is the last day of the E3 games expo in the US (it went on extended beta last year). OnLive has now built out its data centres to cover most of the US. There are none right now outside of the US. The price per month is $14.95 and the first 25,000 sign ups get three months free. He will announce detailed packages, including some loyalty programs at E3.
The payment only gets you access to the service, and some free games, and then there is a small rental charge either per play or per game. You can then play any game which has been adapted for the service, on pretty much any device, without having to buy the game, and without waiting. There are free game demos and access to multiplayer gaming, and our favourite, the ability for masses of other players to watch your game as you play it, what OnLive calls Mass Spectating. This is going to knock a huge hole in audiences for cheap US TV series, why not watch a live game played by a grandmaster instead. Your best performances can be held as video clips to brag about (Brag Clips).
Most reviewers who went to these shows say the start up time for games was about five seconds and they were impressed. Games are due from EA, Ubisoft, Take Two Interactive, WEB Games, Eidos, THQ and Atari and Perlman demonstrated a number of the more popular including the spectator capability and the ability to put a game on an iPhone. We’re not sure about that pricing though, sounds steep, although comparable with online role playing games.