Apparently at the recent Game Developers Conference, OnLive was revealed as the future of video games. Rather than buying consoles or upgrading your computer, you just pay for the service. They run all the latest games on powerful computers out in “the cloud,” and pipe the content directly to your TV screen through the magic of the internet. Since then, it seems like the entire internet has been going nuts over this fledgling service, throwing up stories about how our current way of life is on the verge of being superceded.
Yet I’ve only seen a couple of articles about what seems to me to be very obvious downsides to this kind of technology. Assuming that this is going to pan out as legitimate service that will hold its own as a business (and at this point I think that’s a significant assumption to make), anybody who has used the service has relocated all control over their gaming life to a server farm somewhere. With all of these players, the software companies surely won’t let them buy one copy of a game and distribute it to thousands of people—rather, they will probably end up paying on some kind of scheduled basis. What happens when OnLive decides that your favorite game just isn’t profitable to keep licensing? Sorry kid, you’re SOL.
What if the service goes down, which it inevitably will? There is something to be said for “owning” a game you want to play, which for me is not so much a physical disc as it is a digital file that I can move around and install at will. These files are more significanlty independent from the internet, so that if you’re cut off for whatever reason you can still play. When Xbox Live goes down, all of the Xbox users can still play games. Even Steam allows you to play non-multiplayer games offline, so you can still have fun even if their servers are down.
Finally, everybody who has ever played a multiplayer game online knows about lag. In these cases, the work in delivering the game experience is more or less shared between the client computer and the server. OnLive proposes to move everything to the server side—so why isn’t this going to Lag City? It’s because “OnLive’s technology ‘incubator’ Rearden Studios claims that its servers will deliver video feeds that have a ping of less than one millisecond. Its patented video compression technique is also advertised as blazing fast, with video compression taking about one millisecond to process.” (Kotaku Article) This sounds like the kind of thing you hear on late night infomercials, where the reason why the product is superior is because they have patented technology that makes it superior.
To me, this sounds like yet another curious idea that just isn’t going to be able to make good on its promises. I’ll believe it when I see it—but I’m sticking with Tess.