OnLive

I don’t like the sound of onLive very much – it threatens customisation, modding, and games “ownership” 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 my input-lag figure of 50 being a bit off – it should read 50 on top of a lot of other things).

Since we’ve got the first un-varnished “real world” report of what it’s actually like to use OnLive I wanted to talk some more about it.

If I were to make one prediction right now, it would be that whatever happens with onLive, mouse-controlled First Person Shooters will never take off on the platform.  I think that of all the input methods we expect the mouse to be instantanious and accurate, and no genre is as “twitch” as the FPS.

As is kind of alluded to in the article, we feel better about input-lag with a gamepad.  One of the reasons for that is that consoles already have a pretty hefty input lag – never less than 50ms and as much as 150ms in some games.

I think the really new point here, for me, is that a lot of people can get used to some input lag.  Use it for long enough and we’ll stop noticing it.  Which is fine, and a good thing for onLive, except… onLive’s input lag won’t be consistant.  It’ll vary by at least 10 or 20ms through a play session, and up to 70ms depending on what time of day you play/what the local internet conditions are.  Can we get used to that much variation?  Maybe we can – we won’t know until we try it.  I personally still find consoles subconciously irritating to use – I’m a massive responsiveness-whore.

The mouse-controlled onLive game is still doomed in my opinion, because we won’t be able to get used to it – we spend a lot of time using the mouse with “zero” input-lag, and will continue to do so when onLive is around.  I really wish there was a web-app I could link to suddenly experience the mouse with a 150ms input lag (I had a quick look but couldn’t find one, and if I was handy with flash I’d knock one up) so we could all try it and discuss whether we’d enjoy going to that to play games.

To be honest, I think onLive is going to happen and be a real force in casual and mid-level gaming.  But look at what core gamers are always driven by – the cutting edge.  And onLive, despite how advanced the tech is, is not cutting edge when it comes to games – (relatively) low resolutions; compression artefacts; and lag.  It’s a step backwards.  And it will always be behind Sony and Microsoft’s home consoles.

It’s true that onLive can upgrade its graphics hardware at any time, and therefore get a step ahead of the existing consoles.  Except, that’s not true.  When Microsoft and Sony release a new console generation, the consumers at least pay them for it.  OnLive has to foot the bill itself.  They have no incentive to upgrade their hardware – they won’t be able to charge more for it*.  And they will still be resolution-and-compression limited.  I submit to you this: OnLive will never be the premium way of experiencing games.  And the market for non-premium ways of experiencing games is unbelievably competitive.  Unless you really believe that there’s a massive market of netbook owners ready to spend $30 a month to play Crysis when they’re near a wifi connection which is good enough to use onLive on… it’s not like cafes and trains and airport lounges are going to be thrilled with letting people use what promises to be the most bandwidth-intensive application of the internet.

So my message to onLive is: good luck fighting Nintendo and Sky for the casual crowd.

*you can argue this point, I admit – but I see onLive launching at near the maximum the market will stand, so there won’t be much room for them to go higher.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 5:09 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.

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