On Thursday last week high-definition cloud-based gaming officially took flight with the launch of OnLive. Available only in the United States at the moment, this first-of-its-kind service eliminates the need for pricey PC gaming rigs by running the latest resource-intensive titles on powerful machines in massive data centres and piping a live video feed over the internet to home computer screens.
The promised benefit for consumers is that they'll be able to play some of the world’s most visually spectacular games with any computer they own, so long as it’s connected to the web. Hardware upgrades solely for the purpose of being able to play the latest games will become a thing of the past. And OnLive plans to muscle in on the living room console space as well by making its service available for televisions by the end of the year via an inexpensive set-top box and controller package.
There are benefits for software publishers, too, such as cheaper distribution costs and the elimination of piracy. After all, how can you steal a game when the only part of it to which you have access is streaming video?
But while gaming in the cloud has long been heralded as the future of video games, OnLive has had to deal with heavy skepticism prior to its launch.
An article posted on Eurogamer last year by Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter outlines all of the ways in which OnLive’s promise—a streaming interactive experience that is perceptually no different than running games locally—should be impossible given our current technology and infrastructure. He says that the sort of video compression technology required can’t help but have detrimental effects on image quality, that the cost of stocking data centres with super gaming computers is impractical, and that latency—the time it takes for a player’s inputs to be sent to the data centre, registered in the game, and then viewed via the video streaming back to his computer—will make games requiring any sort of precision unplayable for discerning gamers.
I chatted with John Spinale, OnLive's vice president of games and media, just prior to the service’s launch, and asked him to explain how his company expects to overcome some of the challenges experts like Mr. Leadbetter have identified, starting with the one that could break the deal for most core gamers: Latency.
“We can’t get around the speed of light,” Mr. Spinale admitted, “so there is latency built into the system. The threshold of human perception is 80 milliseconds, or about a twelfth of a second (unless you’re a pro Halo player). As long as the latency remains under this threshold it’s unnoticeable. And we’re well below that threshold. We have very efficient compression algorithms to get things upstream: It takes just a single millisecond. Then we send it back down the wire, again, in under a millisecond. Keep in mind that wireless controllers have latency too—around 20 milliseconds—and that players never notice it.”
I also asked him about the seemingly prohibitive cost associated with ensuring OnLive’s data centres have the amount and type of hardware necessary to meet growing player demand and continually evolving system requirements.
“We’ll always have a spectrum of players playing all kinds of games,” he responded, noting that not all of OnLive’s machines will constantly grind away at resource ravenous games like Mass Effect 2 but instead process less intensive casual games.
He also said OnLive plans to “bring in new generations of hardware every six to nine months. That hardware will become the target reference that developers will develop to for the high-end titles. Basically, we’ll tell them what the reference spec will be for our platform.”
Clearly, the next year will be key for OnLive as the company works to iron out kinks and users determine for themselves whether they're having a pleasant experience.
To OnLive's credit, they say they won’t take your money if they don’t think you’ll have a fun time.
“We prequalify user connections to ensure that they will have a good experience,” Mr. Spinale, explained, adding that important factors include the speed of their connection—you need to be able to manage a steady 5 MBps to stream a game in HD—and whether they reside within a 1,600 kilometre radius of one of the company’s five data centres. “If we think they will have a bad experience, we tell them try again some other time.”
Mere days after its launch, it's difficult to gauge the quality of the experience. Most American game journalists have yet to officially weigh in with reviews. However, gaming site comment boards are slowly filling up with anecdotal reviews by users who have taken the company up on its so-called “foundering members offer,” which waves the $4.95 monthly subscription fee for a year and offers free access to game demos, and they’ve been mixed.
One commenter on game blog Kotaku said “It works, and surprisingly well, I might add! It's a little jerky but the lag is barely noticeable and the quality is actually pretty good,” while an IGN commenter came away with a much different impression: “even as a big hopeful fan boy, I was a bit let down.”
But we may not have to rely on heresay for long. Since many Canadians live within the effective radius of OnLIve's American data centres, a roll-out north of the border doesn't present much in the way of technical hurdles. According to Mr. Spinale, it's more a matter of getting Canadian publishing rights in order. And since OnLive has only a couple of dozen publishing partners at the moment, that shouldn't prove particularly challenging.
We can expect to “hear plans of OnLive’s Canadian roll-out very soon,” he said.
It's still much too early to say whether streaming HD games are indeed the future of the industry, but at least Canadians will have the opportunity to join their American counterparts in the cloud and find out for themselves.
Follow me on Twitter: @chadsapieha
