What you need to know about OnLive

OnLive is a service which claims to stream you your games – taking your input and processing it on the server and sending you the graphical and sound output.  All through the internet.  I want to dispell some myths about it.

Myth 1: input lag has been largely solved by online games, so won’t be a problem here

This is one of the most patently incorrect things you will hear on the internet – and that’s quite an award.

Existing games use client-side prediction to reduce lag.  In online games like first person shooters and so on, you don’t have input lag for movement or mouse movement because it is all done on your computer first.  You only have input lag for shooting – and anyone who’s played an online FPS knows how incredibly jarring that is.  In Counter Strike, you do not even have shooting lag – it’s all done client side straight away and the game uses some clever maths to sort it out.

None of this is possible on the onLive light client.  You will be dealing with the full ping + processing lag for every action.

They said the wheel would never work!  Technology will improve and this will be totally viable

That’s a fine point, except the barrier we’re dealing with is a nasty little thing called the speed of light.  Newton is fairly convinced you can’t get around it.

I don’t think you can expect an average ping of less than forty.  And I’m being VERY generous there – that requires that they have a HUGE number of server farms.  In that case, you’re looking at an input lag of 50.  I’m in the process of mocking up a demo of something with this kind of input lag, but I can tell you it’s not going to be nice to play with.

And in an online game, when the ping spikes a little, you often don’t notice it because your computer is doing all the prediction.  If you have a spike in the middle of a Mario level everything will stutter and you’ll mistime the jump and die.

It’ll be cheaper because I won’t have to upgrade computers and so on

You think it’ll be cheaper?  If it was just a case of centralising your computer then yes it would be, because you’d only need 25% of the computers because even at peak only 25% of people would be using the service.

But there’s a very big problem here – the onLive computers have to be MUCH more powerful than yours.  Why?  Because, to make lag even mildly handlable, they have to process a game tick in 1ms (this is what they’re claiming to be able to do).  Generally, your computer has 30ms to do this.  Can you see the maths?  The onLive computer, to run a high end game, needs to be AT LEAST ten times as powerful as the equivalent home computer.

And the onLive economies of scale are not going to be that good.  They have to have loads and loads and loads of farms to be within a suitable distance for lag purposes.  Each farm will have to have enough processing power to serve 25% of it’s local customer base.

onLive is for you

OnLive is not for you.  OnLive is a good idea for non gamers and families who want easy to access casual gaming.  For all the reasons above onLive will not be able to make you happy.

Ironically, the new WordPress has input lag for typing, and I have had an absolute nightmare writing this post.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 2:12 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “What you need to know about OnLive”

1. UDM:

   § March 25th, 2009 at 2:35 pm

   Bravo! I couldn’t have said it better myself

2. Alex:

   § March 25th, 2009 at 2:51 pm

   Yeah, I totally agree with this. Hugely skeptical of this on live shit. TBH I can’t even see it properly materialising as a competitor to home consoles with all the obvious problems there will be with lag.

3. Wrongfire:

   § March 25th, 2009 at 7:29 pm

   Ah.. and I was worried consoles would die after it came out.. -_-

   lol

4. Visiting the Village: Gaming Podcast » Blog Archive » OnLive:

   § January 22nd, 2010 at 5:09 pm

   [...] and those are all things I like a lot.   When it was first announced I wrote a short post on some of the problems it would face (which is still surprisingly relevant right now, apart from [...]

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