Be Excellent To Each Other

Eh?

Are you saying all those companies have pulled the same stunt as OnLive?

What does Linux have to do with it?

I'm saying that if you only spend money with companies with a morally solid past, you're not going to have much in the way of choice.

By the sounds of it, the staff equity was worth nil in the current operation anyway, so they were screwed out of nothing. It isn't evident that any sale price cleared the existing debt for a start, if it was, then they'd have been able to sell the company and would have chosen to do so.

If OnLive's future becomes a bit more solid, I'll be exceedingly tempted by the Vizio Co-Star - a Google TV box and DLNA streamer with a built in OnLive client.

http://www.vizio.com/costar/overview

They are a bit expensive, Play want £12.99 for the Darkness II they want £39.99 for a full pass

I get that this might save you the cost of an expensive GC, but paying 3 times the cost of buying the game from Play will soon eat up the savings.

Staff get jobs:

Fucking arseholes

I hate it when people who don't have a fucking clue what they are talking about write articles. My pet hate is business/tax, everyone has their own, but this is bullshit.


Thus implying that the corporate rescue made this happen, when

clearly confirms that the staff shares have always been worthless, subject to hope value only, and should have cost them next to fuck all to acquire. If they were giving up significant percentages of a commercial remuneration package to speculate in an untested business model, they were dicks.

Isn't this fairly common practice in IT start ups?

This slice of sky pie is bitter and dry.

Yes, indeed in startups as a whole, but its also fairly common for them to fail. The reason for getting stock instead of shares is, in many cases, entirely because the company can't afford to pay you in cash for your whole commercial salary, so you give up part for the equity in the hope that it works and you make a lot of money, but you should never be giving up so much that you can't afford to live on the cash alone, it should always be considered a bonus. The guys who were getting significant equity out of this should have been well aware from experience and past evidence that there was a very significant change it would end up being worth naff all. But hey, yeah, the staff were ripped off.

I fail to see how the new owner can possibly expect to extract any value at all from it.

1,800 maximum concurrent users? That's fucking tiny.

And after this wobble, despite the continuation of service, who's going to invest any more money in games through OnLive?

It was always a crazy batshit idea anyway, that much was clear, but the numbers are far more horrible than even I was suspecting.

It was a brilliant idea, that could completely revolutionise gaming. However, selling the userbase on the proposition was always going to be extremely difficult, and it would seem they've pretty spectacularly failed to do that.

Mind you, has anyone seen any marketing for OnLive, at all? They're doing a decent job of getting ISPs, hardware OEMs etc onboard, but I've not seen any kind of push to grab market share in the userbase at all.

However, those numbers - 8000 servers with 1800 peak users - suggest the technology isn't as clever as it would need to be in order for this to be commercially viable. I'd rather thought they were spinning up an image on the fly to host your game, whereas it suggests they've actually got all those images up and running and with the games pre-loaded. Great for user experience, but means they've got to have a ridiculous buffer amount of kit to allow for variations in demand for the different games.

In five or ten years maybe, when 90% of the population have got 100meg fibre to the house.

Even on a great internet connection this thing craps out when anyone else is doing anything with the connection at the same time, such is the nature of ADSL technology.



I look at it a different way, there was no proposition to sell, it was a ridiculous nonsense from the start.

It wasn't though - because, having used it extensively, it was fucking brilliant. Instant access to your games, on a machine totally not built for gaming, with (for me) no noticeable input lag, and great graphics. On a 15Mb ADSL connection. And nothing ever made it crap out.

I can see how it wouldn't be aimed at you, because you've already got a competent PC gaming platform, and you live on the Isle of Silly, so you're never going to have awesome data links, but there's a massive selection of the population to whom it would have been a totally viable proposition.

Craster, it doesn't matter how extensively experienced are with all facets of gaming, you will never know as much as the experts here.

Did they need 8000 servers to host 1800 users? Or were they running more servers than they had users for?

With IT they should have been able to see what was coming, its not hard to get stats on an hourly basis from a system like this

Shame though as it was a good idea, more of a shame the shit way it was closed down, you can bet those at the top got plenty out of it.

They'd have had to estimate peak demand for each game, and have enough images available to support that. When you turn that into a library of $lotsofgames, it's a bloody difficult thing to do capacity planning on.

Just because you thought it was great doesn't mean the overall concept wasn't a ridiculous nonsense, which is exactly what I said two years ago in this very thread.

I said then that I just didn't see there was any sort of viable market for this service.

Considering that the company basically went pop with four times as many servers as it had concurrent players, I'd say that was bang on the money.

(I've always been happy to say the technology is stunning in what it achieves, all I've ever really said is that no one would pay for it because it's a fucking daft idea.)

So it needs at least one server for each concurrent user? If so it does just seem daft.

Just because you thought it wasn't great doesn't mean the overall concept was a ridiculous nonsense. See how that works?

There's clearly a market for people who don't want to be on the PC gaming rollercoaster, because consoles exist and sell in massive numbers. There's also a large percentage of those people who'll have access to suitable ADSL connections, by dint of being in a metropolitan area if nothing else.

So what exactly is it that makes it a daft idea for those identified users?

Yes. Because it's effectively a PC running a game. I always knew that was the case, but I assumed they would be able to serve those 1800 users with 1800 images, by provisioning them on the fly - which would be workable. Don't forget that 'one server' in this context is a virtual machine with loads of them running on a single bit of physical kit.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.

I did go through all of this earlier in the thread Craster, I linked two of my posts just a page or so back, all that stuff still stands.

The other thing that's really come on in the last couple of years is mobile gaming, with the likes of the iPad dishing up full hi-def video games for two quid a pop, I'd say that kind of device will hoover up the 'casual gamers' who don't want to be on the PC gaming rollercoaster.

OnLive dished up 'proper' video games in the main, those people are going to have PCs and/or consoles, the rest will just noodle around on their iPad.

But what happens when it next comes time to upgrade a console or PC?

If they can sell these at a fraction of the cost of a PC then it might be an attractive proposition.

They need a critical mass of users, though, and have made almost zero attempt to get them.

This'll be back though, without a doubt.

Also AE, you consistently ignore the main reasons people here prefer consoles - convenience of use and comfort of using a sofa and a big TV. Convenience of a console and power of a PC? That's a no-brainer.

If the current-gen console cycles are anything to go by, we're talking about an upgrade every six or seven years for a console.....

I'm an avid PC gamer and upgrade my PC far more often than I need to, and even I routinely go two years or more without changing anything.



But the price model of the games was all fucked up, and the selection was awful, and it was like the ultimate incarnation of always-on DRM as showcased by Diablo 3.

Even if the OnLive console is free, the games are far too expensive.

No one wants that shit. Apart from Craster. (And 1,799 of his friends.)

It didn't have close to the power of a PC Craster, Eurogamer generally pegged the games as running at LOW/MEDIUM detail settings at 720p, and that's before you add in the artifacting and the input lag, and the fact the game disappears if anything goes wrong with the internet anywhere between the OnLive server and your PC.

Plus a 'real' PC has access to services like Steam and GOG, where you can routinely buy great games for about two quid.

I liked it a lot, and I think I'm probably a lot closer to their target demographic than you are. And don't forget that PC games are going the same network route - In Diablo 3 on PC your game disappears if anything goes wrong with the internet anywhere between the Blizzard server and your PC.

I think that if they could have delivered the real on-demand technology behind the scenes they were promising, and had actually sold the product to their market base, it would have been a very viable proposition. And potentially still is, we'll have to wait and see.

You forget that AE is the only target demographic that matters, Cras. If it's not aimed at him, it's ridiculous.

While that's potentially true, it behooves me to point out that you're ridiculous.

8000 servers for 1800 players.

That sounds pretty ridiculous to me.

The target demographic simply doesn't exist in anything like the required numbers.

Once again, zero marketing. The product wasn't sold to the target demographic. Without a marketing effort commensurate with the launch of a major gaming platform, the numbers only tell you the company failed to do their job, not how viable the platform is.

Or it does and it was badly run/marketed/priced/whatever.

It sounds like a good idea to me, so you've got two people just on Beex who'd pay for it as an offering. Scale that up to the Western world and you've got a massive money spinner.

You don't have to pay for it, which probably doesn't help them.

Well, it worked for Spotify... Oh, wait...

So if they'd just charged a nominal sum it would have been ace, then.

Are Spotify struggling, then?

They were for a while, I believe, until they ditched the 100% free accounts, and got a load of money in from elsewhere. The ads alone weren't paying for it, if I recall correctly. Although I'm pretty sure that was from an Andrew Orlowski article on The Reg, and he's an insufferable knobwick.

They haven't ditched the free account..?

They've ditched the 100% access for free accounts - it's now 10 hours per week and limited to 5 goes on each song.

Oh. I've paid for it for years. So should you - it's fantastic.

I don't use it that often, so it would be a waste of money. It's good for an occasional dabble, then I just find whatever new thing it is on youtube.

You're the reason OnLive failed.

Well, no. Because I'd use onlive, as I play a lot more games than I listen to music. And I can't play the games on Youtube.

Frankly there's no excuse for it having failed.

But seriously Craster, who are the target demographic?

You're talking about a subset of a subset of a subset.

I can only go back to what I was saying two years ago, I just don't understand who it'll appeal to enough, in enough numbers, for them to hand over the sorts of cash OnLive were asking for.

I'm really not convinced it was a lack of marketing, certainly all me and my chums were aware of it, but equally we were all like, 'The fuck? What's the point of that?'

The games didn't even run at 360/PS3 quality, there was no cheap pre-owned, it didn't have any sort of established market, it hammered whatever internet connection it was used on and required pretty much exclusive access to said connection, and it cost a bloody fortune compared to a second hand 360 and a load of second hand games.

It's not a subset of a subset at all! It's console gamers with a decent internet connection who want a bit more from their games than what the consoles can currently offer. You're the one who's constantly banging on about how much poorer the consoles are than a PC in terms of performance - this offers a middleground. Taking your points one by one:


Yeah, they do. Significantly, noticeably better.


True. The same is true for the PSN and Live games one demand stuff too, of course.


Well of course it didn't. That's how new things work. And why would the end user care?


So? The vast majority of the gaming market is young males. They're not exactly likely to have a house full of other people clamouring to use it.



Yes. But not even slightly compared to a new 360 and a load of new 360 games.

Also, you can't make a value comparison against second-hand. That's just silly.

No, continuing to try and have a discussion with ae is silly, silly.

Is it? Where does it say that? Is that who OnLive said they were aiming for?

Like I said before, the whole thing is an answer to a question basically no one was asking.



Everything I read suggested otherwise, although you actually used the service so I'll defer to your experience on that.

OnLive delivered 60FPS which was better than the consoles, but at the expense of visual fidelity, was my understanding of it.



OnLive were after £40 for 'full passes' (which only lasted a guaranteed three years as I understand it) for the top games, XBLA and PSN games cost a few quid with no restrictions on use.