Digital Home Thoughts: OnLive Set to Change the Gaming World

"While OnLive's backend servers do the heavy crunching, pretty much any PC or Mac has the power to decompress the video at what's perceived to be real-time. As Steve puts it, "video is trivial for us now." The demo starts at about 10 minutes into the video and looks damn impressive running on a Dell Studio 15 (16 minutes in) -- yes, it runs Crysis. Controlled yes, but very, very promising. See for yourself in the video after the break."

It was bound to happen. With a lot of things in the consumer market shifting towards "cloud computing", an attempt at cloud gaming was inevitable. OnLive has been in development for 7 years, and I have to admit that a lot of what they've done makes sense. If you can provide a terminal that accesses high performance machines somewhere on the Internet to play games, why not? Like any other hosted service, it gets updated automatically, you get access to a large library of games, it runs on high performance hardware and it is self-maintaining. Still, unlike most other hosted applications, gaming is a slave to latency or more specifically response time. I'm very skeptical of OnLive being able to provide a consistent quality of service that's got high resolution, pretty graphics and a fast response time. I'm biased because I still live in a world where Internet access is still relatively pokey. Even assuming they're able to find a market, or have the technology to scale graphics depending on your internet connection, the other big hurdle they'll need to overcome is the concept of people enjoying the concept of actually "owning" their games. What about you? Would you prefer to own all your games, or would you be willing to live with what amounts to a rental service?