I wonder how US internet providers are going to take this. They're either going to be enraged by another apparent attempt for a company to make money off their 'pipes' without paying for the privilege, like Hulu, or they're going to drool over the idea of customers having even more reason to exceed their newly-implemented monthly usage limits and incur penalty charges.
' Currently, heavy hitters like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two, Warner Bros., THQ, Epic, Eidos, Atari, and Codemasters have all signed on to provide games from their PC stables. Should the experiment succeed, we imagine anything that comes out on the PC will be mirrored onto OnLive in short order.'
An employee of a Gamespot type company (I didn't quite catch the name) called into a radio show last night about a corporate meeting he'd been to on the subject of OnLive. He claimed that the bandwidth and lag for streamed gaming on PCs wouldn't be as high as for streamed video because "it isn't sending whole frames, just instruction code for the video card" * and that the game studios are only supporting streamed gaming in hope that it will kill off the secondhand game media market. Instead of first adopters buying a game as soon as it comes out, beating it and/or becoming bored by it, then selling it to a second wave of players (with zero profit going to the original manufacturer), the studios will continue to release new games on physical media, then follow up with OnLive versions up to six months later, specifically to make buying a used copy less appealing. "They have absolutely no intention of
ever allowing access to the first-run games and code." He claimed. Grain of salt.
*[a BS-sounding distinction I didn't quite follow; I mean, when you get down to it,
everything your computer displays is 1s and 0s cobbled into an image by the video card , eh?)]
edit: Coincidentally, I was reading an article earlier this week about how the rise of 'cloud apps' and cheap asian netbooks means that the only home users who will need to regularly pay for newer and better PC hardware are die hard gamers. (This article was obviously
not in an audio recording or video editing magazine.) And if that OnLive press conference video isn't complete bullshit, maybe that market will begin to fizzle too. If Dell and Hewlett-Packard and ATI and Microsoft such can no longer count on gamers to buy the latest and greatest PCs and video cards because of OnLive, and the mainstream "check my email and watch YouTube, maybe open a spreadsheet" crowd continue defecting to no frills netbooks, would there still be enough profit in hardware to drive performance advancements?
Years and years ago I read about a guy who estimated the amount of hard drive space and performance that would be needed to make the average Star Trek spaceship possible to operate, then came up with a numerical representation of the current state of human technological advancement based on how many regular generational advancements away we are. If the PC industry loses grandmas, and business users, AND gamers, well golly -- I'll
never have an Enterprise D parked in my driveway at this rate!
