One of the things that Faultline has been embarrassed about over the years is that our old slide pack contained the idea that thousands, if not millions of people would one day watch a video representation of two megaliths of the gaming world, battling it out on their own screens, be they PCs or TV. People openly laughed and could not see the point. But we saw gaming as both an active and passive pastime eventually and one that instead of taking away one or two viewers from one TV set, might eventually harness millions ‘ diluting the impact of existing entertainment services.
Now this is one of the immediate possibilities of this week’s launch of a gaming platform which reverses the entropy of moving all computing power out to the user, and brings it all back to the centre. The resulting games are played centrally, just like the massively parallel role playing games, but with the action streamed in video to a remote location.
This step is huge and while it does lead to our game-watching scenario, it leads to far more, as it creates an entirely new set of economics for gaming. For one, it create a games based social network where a stream of game watching is just as simple, and just as valuable as a stream of game playing, But it also means games which requires hugely powerful processing can be played out on central servers and only their visual representations are required ‘ so superfast games can be played on a netbook or even one day an iPod touch or iPhone.
If this was coming from the latest VC powered wonder boy you might think that it is a non-viable flash in the pan, but this system from OnLive comes from non-other than one of the key designers of the Apple Mac and Quicktime – Steve Perlman, an entrepreneur that 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.
Now Perlman has his own incubation business Rearden Companies, which has funded and developed OnLive through seven years of stealth development. Somewhere in there he also contributed to set top company Moxi Digital.
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.
All of this is now possible without any huge downloads, the requirement to own a monster PC, no great installation process, or at least only one installation of the client software, which is supposed to be about as painless as installing acrobat, and yet you can play high performance
high-octane games.
The idea is so simple we could laugh at it. 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 required huge virtual worlds, rapid networking and super fast graphic rendering ‘ but no more. Since networks can already stream video, the system just does that ‘ streams accurate real time video to each device, making a best effort delivery for its processor and connection. The game play itself can just draw power from a bank of central servers.
The effect is so stunning that we are not surprised that EA, Ubisoft, Take Two Interactive, WEB Games, Eidos, THQ and Atari (and a few others) have all signed to make games available for the OnLive system. And for them it is easy, a PC designed game can play on the central servers so there is not much development required.
In effect this is a rival to Xbox and PlayStation and Nintendo Wii and no-one had to spend $billions building a box and an infrastructure. This is a massive case of discontinuous or disruptive innovation ‘ taking the cost of getting onto the new platform to the floor.
There is no physical packaging, no retailer margin, no downloads, no friction and no middlemen. You can’t pirate the game either and the way OnLive has implemented it the game owner can create their own business model ‘ advertising driven, subscription or pay per play ‘ and change it on a whim, dynamically. Or they can leave it all to OnLive which will launch the OnLive Game Service through a monthly subscription this Winter, although the company says OnLive will be available in a variety of different pricing packages and tiers, and competitively priced versus its retail equivalents.
The company will also sell a cheap hardware MicroConsole dedicated to playing these games on a TV set, but it will need nothing much more than a screen, a processor powerful enough to serve the screen, and have a broadband connection. Which is why it is just about the size of a small pack of cards.
This is the type of innovation that companies like Microsoft need to be looking for (and Google and the rest) ‘ logically it is simple. We began the computer industry with a computer bureau – all the processing power in the centre, and leased lines connected to dumb terminals. With minicomputers, Unix servers and PCs, the intelligence was moved back out to the edge of the network. There was always a reason for this ‘ communications was expensive and bandwidth constrained. But it isn’t any longer and not only does the world do much of its work on servers which also double as web sites, but now the humble home console ‘ which in the Sony version of the universe needs the Cell chip, a supercomputer on a chip ‘ can be the thin client which feeds gaming experiences.
There will be some issues here, we predict, in that streaming will need to be fast enough to guarantee gaming response times and in some networks that won’t be possible, but this is still a phenomenal first step in radically altering the DNA of games, and when this is combined with the other radical force in gaming ‘ touch, which is driving gaming on the iPod Touch and other devices ‘ then we will have an entirely new industry.
With new winners.
‘OnLive combines the successful components of video games, online distribution and social networking into one affordable, flexible platform that offers a new way for game fans to access and enjoy content,’ said Mike McGarvey, COO of OnLive. ‘By substantially lowering the barriers between content and consumers, OnLive has created an environment that is highly beneficial for every facet of the video game ecosystem. With OnLive, gamers can play what they want, when they want, how they want. That level of freedom has never been possible until now.’
OnLive will be showing 16 titles playable during the 2009 Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.
We suspect that if this is run rather like the Apple App store, then it will rejuvenate gaming, and make room for many new game producers which will sign into a community overnight that will try and buy their games ‘ and although this will not outflank the major games publishers ‘ it may well create some new ones.