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I give 'em a year

voyager529 10th Mar 2010

Streaming gaming won't work. What they're talking
about seems like they're rendering games on their end
and sending rendered frames via the internet. There
only a VERY select few markets where ultra-low-
latency, high-bandwidth internet will even be
available (20ms would be about the highest it could
possibly go and still be usable). Portable play will
be pointless, because I've never seen a two-digit ping
from a cell phone and even Starbucks wireless has
their own share of latency issues. Even if the user
has a line that's going relatively unused, the very
nature of the service prohibits buffering (remember
RealPlayer in the 90's?). Finally, the UPLOAD
bandwidth to send out 60fps of 1280x720p video is
going to cost stupid amounts of money to maintain, and
again, it's not easily scaled.

The service won't scale too well, because the graphics
still need to be rendered somewhere, and it's not like
you're going to get one GTX280 that can render three
sessions of Crysis simultaneously. The best they can
hope for is that only a small percentage of their
users will be logged in at a time, but weekends will
always be a poor experience.

The rendering itself will again be an issue, since
they will need to either react to player input in real
time like current games do, or predict what the player
will do. The former brings latency back to the
spotlight, while the latter would involve lots of
wasted render time since players won't always need the
pre-rendered frames. This presents a catch-22 that
will be immediately noticeable to any serious
CounterStrike player.

The other way to do this would be to essentially have
the player download one map at a time, and have them
play that map before loading the next one. At this
point, unless the player is playing multiple games
within a month or is playing a brand new release title
that's being sold at sticker price, the green pastures
of video games under $15 for purchase Steam and
GoG.com (not to mention Amazon, Gamestop, and eBay for
physical media) are going to make the savings a wash.

Call me a pessimist if you will, but I have a stack of
video games in my room and a laptop with two graphics
cards. I game just enough to know that a system like
this would only work for an at-your-own-pace game like
Myst or The Sims, or a turn-based game. Games that
require trigger fingers like Unreal Tournament, Call
of Duty, and Bioshock?

This is old news and was covered on Slashdot a month
ago:
http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/01/22/0731247/OnLiv
e-Gaming-Service-Gets-Lukewarm-Approval. Read the
comments from Slashdotters, i.e. a fairly solid
representative of the target demographic, to see
exactly how many people think this is a GOOD idea.

Joey