I can ping google.com with 1-5ms in almost any locale I've been to assuming fiber is installed. Google has a presence in so many areas that low latencies are tr

I can ping google.com with 1-5ms in almost any locale I've been to assuming fiber is installed. Google has a presence in so many areas that low latencies are trivial to get. Sub 10-15ms is easily achievable even with a modest investment for gaming services. Azure or AWS could do this if they chose, but they would have to deploy many mirrors. Even in 'fast action' multiplayer games, as long as the total latency stays under 40-50ms you're good, not great, but completely playable. That's perfectly achievable in a world where we're moving to gigabit and other lower latency last mile solutions. Heck, even my uverse vdsl isn't too bad with latency and that's a last gen technology. OnLive launched when home bandwidth was slow and had higher latencies. I could see this service doing okay as people migrate to better internet connections. Also hardware accelerated mpeg4 is on pretty much all PCs now considering it launched with Sandy Bridge '11. OnLive just launched 5 years too early. The industry would have to change along with this. You'd probably have a slower tick rate on multiplayer game servers to make up for increased latency and other things hardcore gamers won't like, but for most of us, it won't matter. Hardcores won't be using this service anyway. Even if some multiplayer games cant be played like this, its still an incredible value for single player games. A gaming PC is prohibitively expensive still and a hypothetical MS or Amazon version of OnLive could be cheaper than buying a console and buying games for it.