The first major reveal of this year’s GDC is OnLive, a service that seems in a lot of ways to be too good to be true. Put simply, OnLive wants to take the hardware out of the gaming equation: simply log in via a web browser-based plugin, start up any game on offer, and the game starts to play on some godly rig at OnLive’s server farm—with the glorious HD results beamed right into your trashy netbook.
The announcement materials for OnLive make the thing sound truly game-changing. OnLive will let you play modern games on anything, starting with PC, Mac, and a little “MicroConsole” that probably won’t cost more than $100. It will start with PC games (including computer crushers possibly including Crysis), but console games are possible. There’ll be unique community options like unlimited live spectators as well, and you can have it all for a low, Xbox Live-like annual fee (and the price of game purchase/rental, of course).
Now from a technical perspective, this sounds like a unicorn—getting 720p games to react at 60 frames per second to controller input coming from across today's internet is, without devolving into technobabble, a task so close to impossible it’s difficult to discern the space between them. But OnLive has been in development for seven years, so it’s possible that seven years of optimization and cunning tricks could compile into a solution. It’s apparently been working well enough at the press showings, but there’s reason to be skeptical—I am, and so is a lot of the internet.
There are also of course the usual issues that crop up with digital distribution, only more so. Here you don’t even get a download to backup and crack in case of emergency corporate implosion, and if the service ever decides to go on holiday you’ll be back in the Dark Ages till it comes back. It also further marginalizes PC gaming's hardware culture, a landscape of neon and copper cooling pipes that I adore in all its geekiness. And you’ll need a decent internet connection for it too, obviously—5Mbps for 720p and 1.5Mbps minimum, for Wii-like 480p. That sounds like a lot (and you can test your speeds here), but in terms of what OnLive is asking those Mbps to do it’s nothing. It’s miraculous. It’s pushing a Mack truck through an inner tube.
Let’s hope it’s real.
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