212: Destroy All Consoles

[FistsOfTinsel]

I think the trickiest thing to figure out is the business model. But I'm not a businessman, so I can't contribute any insight.

I do know a lot about tech, though, and it seems that most persons who are skeptical have misconceptions about what would be happening under the hood if this tech actually worked.

(ok, here's the part where I reveal that I've been an IT manager for 8 years but prior to that worked as a game artist, and I teach game art/graphics classes on the side. Oh, and I worked in a graphics research lab for a while too).

Your number crunching is pretty speculative, and contains a lot of "assume that..", but that's okay - this is just a forum. Here's my own simpler take on estimating costs, though:

What existing service most closely matches what OnLive would be like, from an infrastructure standpoint? World of Warcraft comes to mind. WoW currently costs $15/month. Now, consider how much more server horsepower you'd need per customer to handle OnLive. You'd need a more pure processing power - I'd argue it's going to be at least 100 times more (as the amount of CPU you need for WoW is almost nothing).

Bandwidth costs? 720p is around 15-20 Mbps, but that's assuming you can create an algorithm that can compress a real-time game render with the same level of quality & efficiency that you get from encoding a film; even "live" HD broadcasts are delayed at least 2 or 3 seconds, if not more. I don't know if I'm as optimistic as you are about how encoding video from a card would be better than from a video signal - you can't look ahead frames on a game the way you can look ahead frames on video (as you can with a delay).

Anyway, I digress; Looking around (like here: http://wow.qj.net/Curiousity-killed-the-imp-what-s-WoW-s-bandwidth-consumption-/pg/49/aid/83144 ) tells us WoW uses about 30KBytes/s, so you're talking about 60x the bandwidth costs, minimum.

What does that tell us? Certainly Wow's monthly cost represents the absolute minimum we could expect as gamers. And we don't really know what percentage of their $15 covers operating costs, but the rest of their cost is profit plus software development - something we can expect OnLive to be charging us for as well. Then there's the fact that WoW expects a certain level of utilization from each paying customer. With a wide variety of games to play, I'm certain that the average OnLive customer will be playing it more than the average WoW player.

I just can't see it being very cheap; $3500 a year, as mentioned by another poster, is clearly not realistic, but with WoW currently costing $180/year, I can't see how Onlive could get by with less than $500/year; if 5% of WoW's fee is hardware+bandwidth ($9), 50x$9 = $450 for infrastructure alone, plus a measly $50/year for software infrasture, similar to what MS charges for Live. That still doesn't include any money to pay for the, you know, GAMES, but if it's all going to be free-to-play with money raised by buying microcontent, expect to pay even more.

So the base cost of $500 is equal to cost of a new $500 console every year, with no games included. How is this supposed to be better for gamers? Granted, hardware & bandwidth costs will drop over time, but that applies to console vendors as well.

That, of course, is assuming the pipe dream of a lag-free setup is even possible (I don't see it happening in the next 8 years), and that the system, at launch, will have enough games on it to make a $40/month outlay seem worth it.

 

[Geoffrey42]

Let's get this out of the way... This article was a long fluff-piece, serving almost entirely as a mouthpiece for the people trying to promote their entry into the marketplace. Is it possible that streaming interactive gaming is going to supplant the console and PC markets? Yes. Is it inevitable? Not by a long-shot, even IF the voodun technical wizardry that the OnLive crew have put together actually turns out to work (given that, thus far, the only technical explanations I've heard are Molyneuxesque in their grand intentions and minimal substantiation, along the lines of "We made magical sauce that makes all known technical hurdles vanish!"). I'm surprised there wasn't a shout-out to the Phantom for blazing the trail that OnLive, Gaikai, and Otoy are following...

In drawing references to the music, TV, and Movie markets, the author highlights one of the primary shortcomings of a streaming approach: the inability to archive, back-up, or even pretend to own a license to the content just purchased. I can back-up my MP3s (and strip them of DRM if need be), the same with my movies, and my TV shows, and if I ever give up paper, my eBooks. Streaming games immediately robs me of any sense of ownership, and I don't know that everyone is really ready to give that up. Renting? Absolutely. Look at Watch It Now from Netflix, or Hulu, or Youtube (as mentioned). I don't own that content, but I do pay some sort of entrance fee (Netflix sub, ads on Hulu or Youtube), and in return, I get to watch what I want at a slightly lower quality, but I don't get to keep it. If OnGaiToy is going to displace anything, it's most of the rental market, and a smaller slice of the ownership market.

From what I can gather, there's probably 1 of 2 strategies at play here: 1. Their magic sauce exists, is superconductive at room temperature, is frictionless, and delivers less than 100ms lag consistently. 2. They're playing on the upside of low expectations; promise us the world, in vague, shady ways; leave the majority of us expecting next to nothing; come out with a mediocre product that performs better than the naysayers (though falls far short of their promises); end up with a consumer base that is pleasantly surprised with mediocrity.

Thank you, transformania, for offering the first technical theory that makes me think what they're trying to do is possible, instead of just "we're smarter than the average person trying to stream an interactive experience."

And, yes, finally, no matter how fancy their technology becomes, the state of broadband (and broadband policy) in the US, and from what I can gather, elsewhere, is in no way ready to support yet another industry trying to offload its delivery problems onto it. Bandwidth is not infinite, it is not consistent, and it is not constant. That is going to have to be some awfully magical magic sauce to get over, under, or around those undeniable hurdles.

 

[dorm41baggins]

I can see streaming becoming viable, but not as a complete replacement for traditional console/PC gaming. I know people who buy all their music from iTunes, some who just listen to XM radio and others who will only ever buy CDs. (Contrary to the author's assertion, CDs have *not* "gone away" and I doubt they ever completely will unless a compelling next-gen physical medium is developed.)

Personally, I'm quite happy to pay a subscription fee for instant access to tens of thousands of songs that I'm not sure I'll like (e.g. Rhapsody), but when I find an album on that service that I *do* like, I'll then go out and buy the CD cause I want a high-quality physical copy of it for my archives. I'll subsequently rip it and then never look at the disc again unless I loose the files, but I still want the nicely manufactured original available if I need it- not some crappy CD-R I burned from a digital copy.

The same thing will be true of games. Some people will only buy the physical games. Others will happily buy stuff exclusively through digital distribution and others will gladly pay for a subscription. None of these models need kill any of the others and the industry would be stupid to cut off availability of titles to any of those channels, though there may very well be exclusives.

 

[AndresCL]

Fuck no, they are not taking away my PC

 

[IssacClarke88]

Did they not try this and fail miserably with the Phantom?

 

[Fox242]

The consoles are going strong and will only get better as time goes on. I don't expect something like this to even come close to succeeding. Admittedly, I know jack about connections and the like that this stuff would require, but I'm a bit wary of something that is so heavily dependent on internet conncections to deliever thi supposed next generation of game playing. The console has a long, long, long lifespan left in it. It will not go away any time soon.

 

[NickCaligo42]

"With server-side rendering, basically, anything that we put up on that system will work forever."

And if they decide that my favourite game is no longer worth their time hosting... then it will just go?

I play a lot of older games, this has absolutely nothing to offer me.

I'd also second what jmancube said, modding of PC games is great and I would hate to lose that function.

It'd sure as hell make it harder for people to train themselves as game developers, wouldn't it?

Frankly, I like having a bloody disc. I like actually OWNING a physical copy of my game, the same way I do with movies and seasons of my favorite shows. That's less the case with music and other less-than-ten-megabyte things that I can easily download and easily replace, or small games like Spelunky and World of Goo, but there's a reason I download those in their entirety instead of stream them: my internet is crap because I'm using Comcast. The first time my connection hiccups, which it does SEVERAL times a day, WHAM! Say goodbye to my current progress. Autosaving aside, I have to go back and re-play the last hour or so, and that's AFTER going through the trouble of starting the game up again.

What's more, isn't this box of theirs supposed to run on a subscription model? I mean, even if I don't have to pay for the hardware, they do somehow, and that cost is going to come right back to me in some way. I'd just be trading out paying for the hardware upfront for paying for the hardware over the course of a year or so--and it'd probably be more than the hardware's worth after not terribly long given all the other costs it'd take them to maintain these big, constantly-streaming render-farms. And in the end, I'd never actually own the hardware, or the games for it. And don't even get me started on the trouble that comes with depending on their servers. That's the very thing that's more or less killed online play for me and my friends over the last few years.

This doesn't seem more economic to me...

 

[thenoblegaunt]

I don't see this being successful, you'd still need to have a really good internet connection and the load times will be unbearable.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Loading times will stretch on for eternity and the bandwidth demands would just be.....

Waaaay too soon. Also I don't trust these new guys. They don't seem like they'll be able to handle this kind of massive project. Streaming games isn't happening anytime soon. Let's wait until the average internet speed for the average household gets a big juicy steroid injection. Then we'll talk streaming games.

 

[grigjd3]

"I would love to sort of brag that we're changing the world," says Helgason, "but the world is really changing anyhow." This is pretend humility. What he is really saying is, I want you to associate us with the ability to change the world. It's the same as the inverse, "I'm not going to say he's ugly, but..." That's not humility at all. In fact, it's clear as can be he has daydreams about how he is revolutionizing the world.

 

[Insideout Ink Demon]

i think their best bet would becasual gamer market.
just looked at their site, and its "hardcore" titles i noticed on their home page, i dont think the typical "hardcore" gamer would take a risk on this

 

[Mista Miggins]

It sounds good;

trouble is that my internet is crap so the games look crap and the lag is crap. Whilst my hardware is good enough (with a couple of programs to give a boost), so for now, i'm just gonna stick with steam.

 

[Awexsome]

Until F2P can match the quality of a regular console experience then I'll firmly resist any kind of change like this. The only place they could be considered even close is PC MMOs.

The best download speed I get when downloading stuff is 170kb/s. On a good day I can stream a 360p youtube video without pausing. Until faster internet speeds that can manage uninterrupted speed become far more common do I see this getting even close to a regular console's popularity for the big industry model of games. Let alone killing them outright.

 

[LongMuckDong]

Hey, I'm down with this if they:

1) Make all broadband plans worldwide unlimited bandwidth.
2) Get fiber optic cables to every gamers house worldwide.


Chances of this even coming close to happening : ZERO.


So, well... I guess I'm not down with this.