4 ms·
OnLive tried it already. It failed spectacularly.
by jarcane 11y ago
OnLive tried it already.
It failed spectacularly.
- vcarl 11y agoThey tried it in the early 2000s, when the network throughput and latency just wasn't what it needed to be. Now we have much better networks, more available cloud computing, and a populace that's more used to streaming things. I'm not sure people would accept it just yet, but I don't think OnLive would fail quite so spectacularly now.
- KeytarHero 11y agoEarly 2000s? The company was founded in 2003, and I can't seem to find any articles mentioning them prior to 2009.
- ansible 11y agoYes, they didn't get going until then, and ended up running... 4 years total? For strategy games and such, I'm sure streaming will always be viable. As we move into the VR realm, even a tiny amount of latency won't be acceptable. So we're always going to need local rendering for action games.
- newobj 11y agoI used OnLive. Onlives problem was NOT latency. It was shit content.
- shurcooL 11y agoYep. I was willing to pay for good games, but they had nothing new for years.
- smackfu 11y agoKind of depends on why it failed.
- jarcane 11y agoIt is fucking expensive. A solution like this is a clever hack, because it's taking advantage of an immense economy of scale provided by a company with really deep pockets operating on a multinational pool of servers that still on balance see a wide variety of different use cases, allowing for a lot of distributed load. Imagine if every user was demanding that same level. As I write this, Steam is counting over 8 million players logged on. Now imagine trying to imagine trying to guarantee them all gaming-level real time performance (fun note here: that GRID card used for the AMI costs $2,000 alone), and doing it all on a reasonable price. Even our Amazon hack isn't doing that. 50 cents an hour doesn't sound like much, but the average gamer is putting in 22 hours a week. Some five million enthusiasts are regularly pulling 40. That's anywhere from $40-80 a month. Not to mention the cost of the games themselves. OnLive was trying to offer this for $15 a month. And originally, they were even footing the cost of the games, aiming for a Netflix/Gametap approach (the latter of which also failed, I might add). Unsurprisingly, they went spectacularly broke.
- lewisl9029 11y agoYep. Something like this will only be economical if you really plan on only using it for the occasional single player game a few times a year. If you use it to play games regularly at even modest frequencies (20+ hours per week), the 50c per hour will quickly start to accumulate and become a recurring monthly bill of $40+. At that point you might as well invest in a decent gaming desktop and stream from it instead. A i3 + 750 TI based system can match the performance of this setup and would cost less than $500 all-in, which is about the cost of 1 year of streaming from this setup at 20 hrs per week. You'll get a much better experience due to the much lower latency and not having to worry about penny pinching on every session.
- balls187 11y ago> A i3 + 750 TI based system can match the performance of this setup Are you sure about that?
- 11y ago
- benologist 11y agoGames are going to have 100+ gigabyte install footprints later this decade, and terabytes when 8K gets here. Phones, tablets, vr headsets and cheap computers - especially cheap steam boxes - will have to rely on streaming.
- Tiksi 11y agoI recently bought a 5tb hdd for $130. I don't think storage is going to be the issue.
- benologist 11y agoDoes that HDD fit in your VR headset? Phone? Tablet? Their constraints are why streaming will matter. That and multi-day download time vs on-demand.
- Tiksi 11y agoThe gpu needed to play games on a VR headset doesn't fit on it, thats why they plug into a computer. And for something that fits in a phone/tablet, a 64GB microsd card is $30. 64 GB on something the size of a fingernail for $30. 10 years ago a 60GB 3.5" hdd cost more than that . Storage expands and gets cheaper at a crazy fast rate.