Be Excellent To Each Other

As discussed earlier, there will undoubtedly be a "no cap for OnLive usage" as part of the deal they have with BT.

Which isn't particulary handy for people who aren't the one who pays the bills.

Not sure what you mean. You mean you wouldn't be able to switch to an ISP that is part of the deal?

I wouldn't. Stupid Hull.

Well that's me out of the running then. There are no uncapped services here now (BT). Even o2 piss and whine if you dare to use some.

Right on my ASS, straight after you kiss it ! both lips, both cheeks....

Haha, retro gaming with a usage of 2.5gb per hour. You gotta laugh

No cap on a stream of shit coming down your pipe doesn't make it any less shit though.

They've managed to make brand new 360 games look like an N64 running through a standard aerial lead to a 14 inch portable telly that's been dumped into a swimming pool full of vaseline and then set on fire.

I'm not going to stop taking the piss when you start using this.

He is the master of the U-turn.

I think you misunderstand. Craster means that when this launches in earnest, there will probably be OnLive specific tariffs that give you uncapped data for use with OnLive.

For OnLive.

I reserve the right to use it in appropriate situations, which would include but are not limited to, when I'm in a hotel or visiting family who have shit computers.

What if it's in five years time when it will most likely be much better? You can't really blame him for not wanting to be an early adopter - it looks fucking atrocious at the moment.

Sigh. Only if you're on a non-LLU exchange. Unless you've got some links to back the statement up. I'm not a particularly heavy user but quite regularly use amounts that'd get me in trouble on other ISPs that have baseline rates double what O2 charge.

There's a difference between not wanting to be an early adopter and cussing the whole thing as a crock of shit doomed to failure.

It makes me feel incredibly dirty for standing up for the PC-loving mongtard, but I've not seen anywhere where he's said it's doomed to failure, just that it looks awful at present (which you can't really dispute).

Oh no, I can't disagree with that - but then again, go to the site and look at the videos. AE's screencap jpg is hardly a fair representation of the quality difference between OnLive and a PC.

Also, I wish they'd done console comparisons. OnLive's market is hardly going to be the graphics-obsessed with hi-spec PCs, is it?

The thing is will broadband speeds and response times increase in conjunction with the level of graphical detail people are used to/expect?

If in 3 years broadband is at such speeds that the service looks OK and responds well @ 1080p say there's also every chance new consoles will be out (or due to be out) pissing in their chips.

There's only so much they can do with those compression algorithms so the only real way the system will improve is as the internet infrastructure improves and we lag that far behind over here I think they are always going to be one step behind the consoles.

Having said that I can see the service being adopted by the likes of hotels, cruise liners and hospitals as a pay as you go service so there may be a market for it as it stands.

Not sure how that would work, even by 2005 standards it still looks like crap.

Also much as you guys seem to think otherwise there are a lot of casual PC gamers who don't own hi- spec PCs, millions of them in fact. So I would think this would appeal to them and families who can't afford the expense of a gaming PC or indeed a console.

That's why I said (BT) in brackets. Every service avaiable here is non LLU and is rented from BT. So basically they're all the same (crap) and vary on price depending which brand you decide to go for.

Either way it won't affect me because I'm not even a huge fan of buying through Steam. I much prefer to actually have something to hold in my hand for my cash.

If and when that changes? well that will be a different matter. But up until then I will simply order physical hard copies of games.

For lots and lots of money.

For that money to be well spent they would need to convince me which would mean offering me something better than what I have now.

What they are offering right now is worse than my P3 450 with a Voodoo 3 3000 in it what? ten years ago? Infact no, make that 12 years ago now.

Hardly making me shake with excitement and make my signature on the direct debit agreement all quiffy.

The original plan with this was to be able to offer people with shite PCs (but HD ready, pretty much any GPU on the market now) the ability to play hyper charged games like Crysis and so on (and better, stuff that isn't possible before now)

As it turns out you could load up Max Payne and laugh at how much better it looks.

You're kinda speculating on the lots of money front. I can get Virgin 50Mb with completely unlimited bandwidth for about £45, probably cheaper with a phone/TV package deal. I'm happy with 10Mb for £15 though.

Good for you ! however there is no cable here at all. And, there won't be either. I can see why, I mean, it's not worth paying all that money to lay cables and etc for an area that is populated so lowly. They would never make their money back.

So that leaves us forced into Sky (£17.99 for the most basic package) and non LLU.

It's actually quite shameful that it's 2010 and they don't even have cable in every home. Even out in the sticks in NJ every one had it.

High bandwidth streaming product in "not aimed at people living in villages in the arse end of nowhere" shocker.

It's 2010 and this is Great Britain for flip's sake. If they weren't so fucking greedy and spent money on upgrading their services and sorting out their lines then I would have cable and so on.

Pish.

Quoted for posterity. I'm almost afraid to ask, but just who's greed is responsible for you not having cable, John?

The bankers. It's all their fault....

I wasn't being serious btw.

That sounds incredibly like backpedalling to me.

Well considering it is words on the internet it shouldn't sound like anything. Read into it what you want to.

Having read the Eurogamer piece in full and having had a good look at all the videos and screenshots (or should that be screenshits? lol roffle etc), I'm sticking with my original conclusion.

There's no domestic market for this, end of. No one who's bought a 360/PS3 and a hi-def screen to go with it is going to tolerate their games suddenly looking like an Amiga shit itself onto a grainy CRT telly. PC owners are just going to laugh it out of town.

It looks awful, it's laggy, you never get to properly own the game, you're entirely dependent on your internet connection and the OnLive servers being up and functioning at full capacity any time you want to play a game on the service, and you're paying wedges of cash for it.

As for the other potential outlets (i.e. hotels), it's an appealing idea but thinking about it, what if ten guests all want to play at the same time, what hotel has a 50 meg internet pipe? What hotel is going to accept a single room demanding a solid 5 meg of bandwidth? To put that kind of internet feed in place is going to cost a fortune, and if your guests aren't gamers, you're fucked.

(Same basic principle applies to any other facility that would potentially offer it to their guests.)

I don't see the market for this, I really don't, the only market that would be viable is stymied by a woeful lack of bandwidth and capacity, and as for the home market, the mere idea that people are going to buy into this much of a retrograde step is laughable.

I'm mightily impressed with what OnLive have achieved, it's a stunning technical achievement, but it's just not good enough to tempt people to pay for it IMO.

And Trousers is quite right, if/when they do get it working better, we'll be a generation ahead at home again, and the same problems will all apply.

Your original conclusion is still based on far, far higher expectations than Joe Blogs. You'd be surprised how many people have a 360 or PS3 and HD telly yet connect it using something other than HDMI or component yet still "see" that it's in HD.

But Joe Bloggs is fast learning that gaming is free (Farmville) or really cheap (iPhone).

The real killer for OnLive is not only is it demonstrably worse than a base-model 360 connected to a cheap TFT, over the course of the first year it'd cost more as well!

You need a 'minimum spec' PC to use the service that would only cost about £100 less than a reasonably capable gaming PC, the whole thing is a nonsense.

If they can get it integrated into tellies or Sky boxes or stuff like that, then maybe, but even then most people haven't even got the fucking internet pipe for it.

It's bizarre, it really is.

I thought it needed "a PC capable of downloading at 5mbps and decoding that relatively simple stream for display at 30fps". Otherwise known as "the computer anyone interested will already have." Or the 'cheap' custom box thing.

But therein lies the point, the 'computer everyone already has' is being used to play Farmville or an old copy of The Sims or any one of a million free web-based Flash games.

These are not the people who are going to cough up $15 per month subs (so read £15 per month here....) and then pay extra for every game on top of that, a game that they'll never own and will kill itself after three years.

Chances are these same households already have a 360/PS3/Wii in them, there is NOTHING about OnLive that would tempt the users of those consoles to the service.

Moreover, one only needs to look at the massive pre-owned market to see that console owners like getting old games for £20 or a tenner or even less, you think they're going to drop that much per month just to access this service?

The casual market will not be tempted to OnLive, the 'proper' gaming market will either avoid it on reputation alone, or quickly discover its woeful shortcomings.

I'm nailing my colours to the mast on this one - EPIC FAIL.

(back to being serious).

It's not like it hasn't been tried before. Sega TV was a massive failure.

Ho hum, I suppose they're free to try what they want

Apparently not, it would appear. Giz have some stuff about it:

http://gizmodo.com/5692903/onlive-micro ... to-your-tv

And here's the box they're launching with - for $99



That's starting to sound to me like a really interesting prospect.

As I've already said in this thread - 'If they can get it integrated into tellies or Sky boxes or stuff like that, then maybe'...... (And they haven't actually done that yet.)

I still say fail anyway, $99 = £99 over here, that's not far off a basic XBox 360 (or it is a 360, if you go second hand), and they're still wanting a subscription on top of that.

I continue to be very impressed by the technology and what they've achieved with it, but I also continue to think that nowhere near enough people are going to pay for it to be viable.

Hmm. I disagree. And the reason I quoted you on this one is because I think they've done here exactly what you were talking about - they've integrated it into a little standalone HD box (the thing's tiny, and I'd rather have a single dedicated unit than a builtin to anything else), and made that a really attractive pricepoint.

They've also dropped the subscription fee.

Have they? It looked to me like they were keeping the subscription fee, but making that all you pay, including access to all the games.

Suddenly I am interested.

Are you only allowed to impart one piece of information per post or something?

http://blog.onlive.com/2010/10/04/onliv ... -for-free/

The 3-day, 5-day, and Game passes he talks about are to individual games. The rentals are $5-10. The game purchases are priced like PC games at $50ish, rather than a console's $60 - AE has previously used this as a reason that we should be PC gaming, not buying Xboxes. Finally, the $99 box comes with a free $50 game of the purchaser's choice.

Admittedly, I thought this was a ludicrous idea when it first came out, and had no idea how they could actually make it work.

I've just downloaded the client for the Mac and had a play. I am quite simply amazed!
I tried out 3 games, in full screen on my 27" display, and they all started immediately and looked pretty good in terms of detail, if a little fuzzy in terms of resolution. I just plugged my usb xbox controller in and it automatically recognised and mapped all the controls.
Virtua Tennis 2009, played perfectly, looked good, started instantly.
Prince of Persia, again, played perfectly, looked great, started instantly.
Dirt 2, now here is where it feel down for me, looked nice, but the framerate was poor when actually playing. The framerate was fine in replay mode, so I don't think it is a problem with my download speed as such, maybe a latency issue due to the servers being in the US?

Now, if they can sort out the jerkyness/poor framerate on the faster games, I think they really might be onto something. For a couple of reasons:

1) Subscription model, assuming it is a good price, would be very interesting to me and I assume most gamers.
2) I can stop playing now, on this iMac, walk into the front room and pick up exactly where I left off on the TV (assuming I had the TV box), then fly to the US and pick up where I left again on my laptop...

I won't be buying one just yet, they need more games, a good sub model, local server farms etc... but i'll be keeping an eye on it for sure.

That's a good point - why the fuck haven't I tried this yet?

Downloaded.

It's crap. Even the menu carries on dropping significant graphical fidelity and blurring through artifacting to the point it makes the Wii look like a graphical powerhouse. This is probably due to the constant connection errors it's also getting.

What's your broadband speed? I didn't have any of those sorts of problems.

Thoughts as they occur:
There's practically nothing to download. Register, and you're off.
There are plenty of games with a free trial.
$5.99 a day sounds like something I can take advantage of.
Everything is so fast and smooth!
I'm trying Darksiders. I get 30 minutes.
Okay, Darksiders isn't really my kind of game. The framerate is okay, but the graphics aren't great - I think I need to find my settings because it doesn't like my Internet connection (because I had a load of torrents turned on when I first started up).
The mouse control seemed really sensitive - might have just been the game - I'll find an FPS.
I'm trying FEAR2 now. While you wait for the game to load, you watch someone else who's playing it. Genius!
It could do with a way of remembering my key bindings (especially as I'm not a WASD player)
Okay, FEAR looks much better.
There's a little input lag with the mouse, seem to notice it more when stopping movement than when starting, more like a console. Is the server guessing where I'm going to move the mouse, maybe. I guess the servers are in America, though - expect it to be much improved if the get a UK centre.
Keyboard responsiveness is fine.
I'm perfectly capable of killing bad men. There is a delay from mouse click to gunfire, but it's a small one.
This is a little laggy. If you already hate the idea, then you are going to find plenty to dislike. However, if you've got a lunch break to kill at work, this is going to be the mad shit.
Arena mode lets you see people playing a game, and zoom in and watch them if you like. I like it. You can 'cheer' and 'jeer' at the person playing
It's all so fast.

So yeah. Colour me impressed.

Me neither, I must confess.

It's nominally either a 8 or 10Mbps connection - can't remember as it's somewhat irrelevent - which tends to very between a 5.5Mbps connection and a 7.5 one depending on how it feels.

Certainly better than the 3Mbps minimum and meets/exceeds the stated recommendation of 5Mbps.