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I remember thinking OnLive's pitch of letting you stream games to low-end hardware was a very good idea, but it never took off. I think nVidia SHIELD offers a s

I remember thinking OnLive's pitch of letting you stream games to low-end hardware was a very good idea, but it never took off. I think nVidia SHIELD offers a similar pitch, but I don't know how popular it is. So, this is essentially those services, but allowing you to use a web browser as a client, right? I would only find this valuable if there was any performance gain in doing so, or if those services didn't make a client for the device I wanted to game on, both of which seem unlikely. Unless I drastically misunderstood what is happening, and the game is actually running on your hardware in the browser, in which case that is very impressive...but then I would have to question the performance.

andrewmd5 8y ago
Rainway is fast and clientless. Our vision is all about letting you use your existing hardware (home gaming PC, cloud provider) to enable the gameplay experience. So you installed our software and then the web app takes care of the rest. We curate all of the games you have installed on your machine and enable a click and play experience.
gh02t 8y ago
> I think nVidia SHIELD offers a similar pitch, but I don't know how popular it is. The Shield itself has been fairly successful from what I know, especially if you consider its fairly high price compared to other Android TV boxes. I have one and can say I really like it, Nvidia has been really committed and provided constant updates on top of a pretty stable hardware platform. Game streaming on it works pretty well and has been moderately successful. It works smoothly and latency is low enough to play all but the twitchiest of games. The biggest advantage is that for all the games I've seen you can play them as long as you already own them on Steam, you don't have to purchase them twice (in addition to supporting native Steam in-home streaming now I think). The selection of games available to play on Nvidia's streaming service isn't colossal, but they have a constant trickle of popular games so there's plenty of things you'd actually want to play (and you get a pretty generous range of older-but-good games to play for free with the Shield). I bought mine as a media player, but the game streaming is a very nice perk.
georgeecollins 8y ago
OnLive’s pitch was great but latency ruined the experience. If you had a terrible computer with a superb internet connection it was ok (not great). And that is not a common combination.

andrewmd5 8y ago

Rainway is fast and clientless. Our vision is all about letting you use your existing hardware (home gaming PC, cloud provider) to enable the gameplay experience. So you installed our software and then the web app takes care of the rest. We curate all of the games you have installed on your machine and enable a click and play experience.

gh02t 8y ago

> I think nVidia SHIELD offers a similar pitch, but I don't know how popular it is. The Shield itself has been fairly successful from what I know, especially if you consider its fairly high price compared to other Android TV boxes. I have one and can say I really like it, Nvidia has been really committed and provided constant updates on top of a pretty stable hardware platform. Game streaming on it works pretty well and has been moderately successful. It works smoothly and latency is low enough to play all but the twitchiest of games. The biggest advantage is that for all the games I've seen you can play them as long as you already own them on Steam, you don't have to purchase them twice (in addition to supporting native Steam in-home streaming now I think). The selection of games available to play on Nvidia's streaming service isn't colossal, but they have a constant trickle of popular games so there's plenty of things you'd actually want to play (and you get a pretty generous range of older-but-good games to play for free with the Shield). I bought mine as a media player, but the game streaming is a very nice perk.

georgeecollins 8y ago

OnLive’s pitch was great but latency ruined the experience. If you had a terrible computer with a superb internet connection it was ok (not great). And that is not a common combination.