OnLive have hit the headlines in quite a big way recently. They’re starting the PR on their new technology which is aimed at allowing users to play games over the net with all of the intensive graphics processing being carried out in large server farms. At your end you just need a really cheap OnLive box or an old PC or Mac that’s been gathering dust. The concept works on the principal of your inputs being sent over the net to their servers, which process them and create the game video in real time, sending it back to you as a heavily compressed video stream. This means your basically watching a video stream, like watching a YouTube video, except that its high quality and being created in real time just for you.
Being a nerd this is all rather difficult to take in, as everything current day network and computing technology is up to points to this new technology being hyped up rubbish. However pretty much every big games manufacturer on the planet is behind it, giving it instant credibility and forcing a re-evaluation of what is becoming possible. As further evidence, take Crisis which is is basically the ultimate high end video game. Its so demanding it can’t be created on the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3. To give you an idea of how powerful this technology is, OnLive are not saying their system will run this game, the guys who make Crisis say it will run Crisis! Oh, and not just a bare bones version, the full version with all options turned on!
OK so services like this tend to always be over hyped to some degree, and it seems safe to say that however good the service they end up providing its certainly going to be inferior to having the hardware locally and not having to stream over the net. Maybe the serious tech heads or most demanding users will stay away, but to the average masses who tend to accept a bit of limitation if the price or convenience is on the mark this technology, if it works, will be an instant hit. Microsoft spent well over $1 billion developing the Xbox360 – this technology could wipe it out virtually overnight. How well it works we’ll find out towards the end of this year, but you’ve got to think that the big players out there are lining up to try and buy this company now.
However, there is something much more significant about this and the impending cloud computing revolution. Games are pretty much the most intensive thing an ordinary home or business user can throw at a computer. If this service can do them then all bets are off, as the next logical step is for server farms to take over all our everyday applications, and the whole operating system. This is not a new concept, but OnLive’s claims suddenly forces you to sit up and take notice of what’s coming. Its not coming in a few years, its being trialed now and is coming this year. No doubt the likes of Microsoft, Intel, nVidea etc are sitting up as this technology threatens to throw out of the window their entire perpetualal upgrade cycle business model.
